Crying All The Time

Our pediatrician told us our daughter Julia had colic. She cried all the time without regard to day or night. Our only help was to use tips we learned from the Happiest Baby on the Block (Which I highly recommend): swaddling Julia, using white noise (a hairdryer worked best for us) and walking around bouncing her. Even then she cried more than the average baby. i wasn't convinced that "colic" was the answer and that we would just have to accept the fact that our baby was crying all the time.

When Julia was 2 weeks old, one of the pediatricians in the practice suggested that I cut out dairy from my diet. "Fine," I thought, "easy enough." WRONG! I thought that cutting out dairy meant no butter, cheese and milk. I had NO idea how many things have dairy or dairy derivatives in them. This took me a whole month to realize, so while Julia seemed to feel a little better, she was still crying an awful lot. When Julia was about 2 months old I finally figured out what did and did not have dairy in it, and within 4 days there was a dramatic decrease in Julia's crying spells. It took about 3 weeks for all of the dairy to get out of my system, but by the time she was 3 months old, Julia was like a different baby. Some may say that it was really colic all along, since colic is supposed to start getting better at around 3 months, and maybe that had something to do with it, but I believe that if I had understood how to cut dairy out of my system earlier on, it still would have made a big difference. Even now (Julia is almost 8 months old) when I give her milk I pumped when I was not cutting out dairy (I call this my "dairy milk" stash) she has issues. I'll get to that in a later post.