Barnacle baby & the year of no sleep

For his first eight months, my daughter Agent would wake up every forty minutes to every hour or so in pain with gas. After that, up until she was one year old, she slept no more than three to four hours in a row, so neither did I. This is the sort of thing you subject people to for actual torture, to tell you secrets. If I didn’t just tell anyone everything all the time, I would have been ready to talk by the end of that year.

I realized after the first three months that she had a food allergy through my breast milk. I knew this because they say that if the baby has colic that they will magically get better, and Agent did not. She kept getting worse. The poor little hamster would wriggle in agony all day long. I would pump her legs to ‘fart’ her, gave her all the gas medications that exist on the open market, and went through all the herbal remedies I could get my hands on. Google was my bitch. All cultures were considered, all options used, nothing worked. So I began to work on the non-standard plans to get Agent well and both of us sleeping.

The usual suspects elimination diet plan

I went off the regular things first, cow’s milk, soy products, carbonation and caffeine. She got a little better and we narrowed it down to the carbonation and the cow’s milk. This meant that I couldn’t try to put her on formula to make her better, because most of them were based off cow’s milk. The soy formula, my pediatrician and I decided, was too close to milk protein for baby intestines, and she didn’t want to drink it at any rate (I tried it out, just to make sure).

The co-sleeping plan

In the meantime, I had worked out sleeping strategies to make life easier. Agent was sleeping in my bed so I could snuggle, breast feed and calm her down without having to actually move nine times a night. During the day, I bounced her on my lap so that he would nap. This meant being trapped under a baby for six hours during the day and attached to her pretty much all night by the nipple. My then-husband would not help with any night wakings, so I was doing all this solo.

The alternative medicine plan

Then she got worse again. The ex-husband and I had taken a trip to Europe and Agent was in pain all night long, plus jet lag, plus babies just aren’t that into travel so far as I can tell. So screamy madness for two weeks was the norm. When we got back, she was almost six months old and I was now ready to do anything to get her to sleep, even if it meant eating almost nothing. It meant eating almost nothing. Boo.

I took her to a Cranial Sacral Therapist, which sounded, to be honest, like a pile of bullshit. Healing touches for babies...okay, suspicious. However, I was ready for leeches at this point, so go ahead and squish my baby! The people I went to were also Chiropractors so they started working on knots she had on her neck from having the cord wrapped around her neck twice during labour. They said that the vagus nerve in her neck was inflamed and it wraps around your intestines, so it could be causing impaction, not allowing the gas to pass through. I was impressed. These hippies had some science behind them!

The no food elimination diet plan

I started telling the Cranial Sacral Therapists (who I had nicknamed “Baby Squishers”) about my elimination diets and they had a list of things to try out that hadn’t been suggested by the pediatrician. Then I couldn’t eat dairy, soy, carbonation, lectins, gluten, eggs and foods that are cross contaminants for people with latex allergies (which I have). I could eat meat, a couple of veggies and a few fruit. I did six weeks of the full elimination diet and there was no change in Agent. My personal doctor, who I had brought in on it, said that it must be the gluten, because that’s the only thing that takes that long to detox from. Agent had a bout of getting worse too, and the doctors realized that the gluten was detoxing through my breast milk, so she was getting an extra dose. Two weeks later, she stopped having the gas pains. We were all thrilled!

At eight months old, she started sleeping for three to four hours in a row, which after my previous lack of sleep, seemed like luxury. But she still wanted to sleep with me. Once she crawled herself off the bed, I had to move her to her crib though, which proved an unpopular decision. She was waking up every two to three hours, still required lap napping and I was starting to go a little nutty. Okay, a lot nutty. I forced my then-husband to start taking on the mornings from 6am-7:30am so that I could have some baby monitor free sleep, which helped but, damn, a woman needs more sleep!

The sleep training plan

After Agent turned one, my paediatrician’s nurse recommended Dawn Fry to me. She had a non-cry-it out sleep training method that I might like. We had already tried to cry-it-out, but Agent has staying power and cried for five hours straight, convincing me that I hated that method. Dawn came over, gave me a training session and within four weeks Agent was sleeping in her crib for all naps and all night, for the entire night. She now even sleeps through teething at night (for the most part — teething plus colds sometimes will cause her to wake and need re-settling). Naps, not so much. But I love the hell out of this method. There is some crying, but you always come to the baby when they do cry. The key is not to do anything in the room during sleep time that they can’t reproduce on their own. No talking, or shushing. You set up a loud white noise machine and keep the room really dark. While the white noise machine is on and the lights are off, you do not pick them up or talk. You can give them reassuring little squishes to simulate them rolling around in bed and you get them attached to a “blankie”. You teach them that they can sort themselves out with toys and sippy cups of water unless they have a real issue, and they learn it! Dawn was writing a book when I met her, I recommend buying it if it’s out.

The victory dance plan

I’ve had many months of sleep now and I don’t know how I survived that first year without killing several people. The upside to elimination diets is that you easily lose all your pregnancy weight, the downside is that you hate everything. There is no upside to not getting to sleep. None. People need to give new parents more cred for just being able to cope with things like lukewarm tea, figuring out how to turn a shirt right side out and not leaving their baby on the counter beside the garbage disposal. Those who go back to work and are up all night too get my intense sympathy. For now, I’m just going to victory dance every morning I feel well rested.

Restful nights for all!