Colic, Colic, Colic Be Gone!

So as you can tell from the title, Boo has colic.

When Boo was born, he came fast and he was very grunty, and a ribena head, (they were the technical terms) and they didn’t let us out of hospital immediately.

Once Mr L left us in that hospital the first evening, Boo started to cry and he didn’t stop all night. The doctors where pleased as it got rid of his grunting but it was serious hard work, so hard that he was actually taken from me twice by the nurses to give me a break. He just screamed and screamed and screamed.

We got him home and the screaming seemed to continue, the first few days, Mr L and I thought that he just had his days and nights all mixed up, and that it would settle a couple of days later, however it didn’t seem to settle.

Boo has been formula feed from birth and on his first few visits to the midwives he had lost weight like all babies do, but he wasn’t putting it on as quick as they would hope so we had to stay under them for a while longer.

Once we started to get into a routine and everything was back to normal it became evident that Boo was struggling, burping wasn’t happening and we tried infacol the same as we did with Baba and it still didn’t do a lot, we tried gripe water and that didn’t help to get his wind up and he seemed to be in pain.

He has a bottle and burping then doesn’t happen, he struggles for a few hours, we get a lot of crying and screaming, and his back arches and his little legs get raised to the ceiling and he is just in so much pain. It was obvious that we had a baby with colic.

We spoke to the midwives as this was colic that was making him suffer all night, he was screaming from around 11pm until the next morning and there was no let up. Poor boy was making his voice hoarse from all the screaming, and Mr L and I were getting no sleep as he was in so much pain.

It was decided to try him with Premade SMA instead of the formula SMA as it is a little thicker and could be easier for him to digest, we tried it and we got a couple of hours sleep it seemed to be a godsend, so it is what we have remained on. More than anything he wanted the bottle where as before he was always hard work to get to take his bottle so that was an improvement straight away and his colic didn’t seem as bad.

Since then we have battled with colic daily, we moved him from his moses basket as even with it a little raise at his head end he didn’t like it and screamed the moment he was put in it, so he was put in a cot at 3 weeks old, which increased his time sleeping.

We have also changed the way we feed him, the midwives advised feeding him sitting up and not letting him lay down for a while after a feed, and it took a while to get used to it, but we are all now perfect at feeding him upright and he seems to take his food much better this way.

6 weeks on we have good and bad days with his colic, some days you can’t even tell he has it, other days he still screams all day and the only time he is comforted is when he is on either myself or Mr L. It is hard to watch his little tiny body in so much pain and there really isn’t anything that we can do, except ride it out and wait for it to get better and for it to finally disappear.