It's every mother's nightmare - a baby that just won't stop crying. I never thought it would be mine. I guess I should have anticipated it. After all, one doesn't get to give one's own mother hell and then expect not to receive payment in kind. This must be a weird kid of paying it forward scheme.
Yup, I apparently gave my poor mother so much grief with my colic that not only did she wind up drinking my gripe water (which in those days contained alcohol), but she also threatened to throw me out of the first floor window. Sorry, Mom!! I still love you - you know that, right?
And now it's my turn. Again. I thought Nellie's colic was pay-back enough. Apparently not. Apparently both my children have seen fit to give me hell as pay-back for what I did to my mother. But, unfortunately for Nate, this time around I am older and wiser. I gave him 7 weeks to get over himself. I held him upright during feeding, slept with him on my chest, rocked him, patted him, sang to him, shushed him, bounced him, jiggled him, pushed him in his pram, drove him around in the car. Nothing worked. So, I gave him drugs. No joy. Then I gave him alcohol. That worked, as a short term solution. Then I gave him more drugs (since the first ones weren't working)... which also didn't really help.
After being awake for 8 hours (2.30am - noon, bar 2 hrs from 5-7am), I eventually decided to pull out the big guns, the mother-load cure-all. I took him to see a chiropractor.
Now some people don't do 'alternative therapies'. Me? I love them, but only after I've tried the conventional stuff. I actually wanted to take him to BSR (Body Stress Release), but hubby has a generous dose of scepticism. Of course, the fact that BSR has helped (and continues to help) me prevent my sciatica from returning when physio, chiropractics and acupuncture failed, doesn't seem to feature in his decision. Anyway!
Of course, being me, once I've decided that this is what I'm going to do, I want an appointment YESTERDAY already. And of course, no-one can accommodate me. Eventually, I turn on the waterworks (or rather, I couldn't stop myself from crying out of desperation, if truth be told) and basically beg for one. It works, and we got an appointment yesterday... but it's all the way past the Boerewors curtain, so the trip there and back is about 3 times the length of the actual treatment itself. The things we do for love ...
... and peace and sanity and sleep... let's not kid ourselves that this is entirely for Nate. Oh no! This is for me too. I want to sleep again. I NEEEED to sleep again.
So off we go to the chiropractor. I was worried that Nate would suddenly become an angel, and she would think I was imagining it. I needed have worried. Nope. The poor kid screamed his way through the entire session. Well done, my boy! Protect your mother's image!
Apparently, his spine is 'very tight'. As a biologist, I thought it was a good thing that your vertebrae held on tightly to one another. You know - protect the spinal cord and spinal nerves, and all that. But there is tight, and 'very tight', apparently. The former is good. The latter, not so much.
So has it worked, I hear you ask? Hmm... if you call sleeping an improvement, then yes, I think it has. Of course, we have at least one more session to go. (I'm thinking about how Jesus healed the blind man in stages...) But at least he's sleeping. He is still vomiting up milk, he still has reflux, he's still a bit constipated - but at least he's now sleeping again, and not just sleeping, but actually sleeping in his own bed (and not on my chest/ in the sling/ on Priscilla's back).
If we've gone from no sleep to sleep in one session, what, I wonder, will tomorrow's session hold for us????
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