Growing Pains

My five month old baby is going through something. I don’t know if it’s a growth spurt, or teething, or a cold…or all of the above. But it’s wearing me out!

He’s been crying a lot, much more than he normally does. And he’s been nursing about every two hours again, but he’s also been eating whole jars of pureed fruits and vegetables and whole bowls of rice cereal.

Dealing with a baby that’s very fussy is hard in general, but when the baby is the youngest of several children, it makes it that much harder. There’s no more “napping when your baby naps” or grabbing your purse and driving around the block a few times to get him to sleep. When you’ve got older kids too, it makes things a lot more complicated.

I’m glad that my older kids are willing (most of the time) to help me out by giving the baby his pacifier, or singing him a song. Those things would normally calm him down, but whatever the baby is going through makes him so much more demanding. It seems that a lot of times, the only thing that will soothe him is nursing, even if he only nursed an hour ago.

But he’s not the only demanding one. My oldest needs his lunches made every day. They all need breakfast. The toddler needs attention and rest when she wakes up too early because her big brother and sister have to go to school. So, I can’t always drop everything and nurse the baby. But because he’s needed me so much the last couple of weeks, I’ve had to figure out how I CAN drop everything for a few minutes and calm him down before going on to something else.

Neither my husband nor I can listen to a screaming baby for too long, and the evenings have been the worst. Whoever is not giving the older three a bath and putting them to bed is trying to console the baby, who absolutely refuses to be consoled. And that wears on a parent. Obviously, my husband can’t nurse him, so if I’m in charge of the bedtime routine, he’s left with a baby that won’t respond to anything he does. Not only am I trying to get all the kids in bed quickly so they can go to sleep and get up early for school the next day, but I’m listening to my baby cry relentlessly, knowing that he’s not going to calm down until I’m with him. That makes me rush the older three, skipping out on a story or brushing their teeth too quickly and urging them to just get in bed already.

I’m sure this is just a phase and we’ll all come through to the other side relatively unscathed. But boy, does it seem to be lasting forever.

Have there been stages in your baby’s development that you didn’t think would ever end? How did you deal with it?