Anvari Chronicles // Maine, June 2013
Asher and I spent a lovely week in Maine with my parents, as well as my brother, sister in-law and niece. It was absolutely wonderful and I’ve been trying to convince Rafaan to move to a quaint ocean town ever since. Things have been a bit crazy around these parts, with the approaching nuptials of my younger brother, so I will be back in full force sometime next week, but until then enjoy these photos.
For Your Reading Pleasure // I Read All The Baby Sleep Books
This post by Ava Neyer touches on how confusing and frustrating infant sleep patterns can be and the advice out there isn’t much clearer. You can basically find something to support any field of thought on infant sleep if you dig deep enough. I’ve heard a lot of people say that their babies “just aren’t good sleepers.” While, this may be true in some instances, unless you’re willing to try a lot of different methods, you shouldn’t put the blame on your baby like that. If your baby isn’t responding well to one method, move on to another and if that doesn’t work try something else and so on. There are so many varied methods of sleep training that you should be able to find one that works for you and your baby. Don’t give up.
So read this.
On another note, I am once again going out of town. This time I am heading north to the tiny and lovely town of Eliot, Maine to spend a week with my parents before we all head back to the D.C. area for my younger brother’s wedding. I will be taking Asher with me, but sadly Rafaan, can’t spare the vacation days so it will be my first time flying alone with the babe. While, I’m going to miss my hubs immensely, I’m so thankful to him for understanding my need to spend quality time with my parents and giving me his blessing to take his son away from him for a whole week. I do not think I’d be able to do the same if our roles were reversed. He truly is the better half of us.
Needless to say, posting may be light while I’m away, but I promise to document our trip thoroughly. I have a lot of requested posts that I am currently working on in draft form in the queue. So, if you’ve requested a certain topic, rest assured it’s coming and thank you for your patience.
Anvari Chronicles // Texas Summer 2013
We had a blast in Texas and Asher was a huge hit! Raf and I barely held him the whole time we were there, in fact we began to forget that we were parents all together. We went on not 1, not 2 but THREE dates while we were there and it felt so nice to reconnect with the love of my life. We ate a ton of delicious food and spent lots of time with Raf’s extended family which was lovely.
Sorry that this picture is a little blurry, but I had to include it because it highlights the shirt that Rafaan’s mom made for Rafaan when he was a baby and they were living in Pakistan and that has now been gifted to Asher.
A Picture For Your Sunday // 4
Asher has learned how to sit, he can’t yet sit up on his own, but if you plop him down he can stay up for a while before toppling over. Progress!
Woombie Review
Asher was a swaddle houdini. No matter how I swaddled him he always managed to get the fabric up around his face and I was worried that he would suffocate. Not swaddling wasn’t an option due to his over active arms, which would constantly flail about and keep him awake, so I was thrilled when I discovered the Woombie. 
This thing is seriously amazing. There was absolutely no way that he could get out of it and I especially love the two way zipper, which made changing his diaper in the middle of the night a breeze. They also come in a variety of fun colors and styles that suit any situation. They have fleece ones for winter, cotton and mesh ones for summer and even a slightly tighter one called the ‘houdini‘, which was the very first one that I got Asher. I eventually ended up getting a second woombie in their original style, just so that I would always have one handy if the other was in the wash. I am in love! They come in two sizes, but we never ended up needing to get the bigger size, since we stopped swaddling Asher before he got that big. The whole idea is that it’s supposed to mimic being in the womb. The babies can still move their limbs about and bring their arms up to their chest (which is much nicer than having their arms strapped to their sides) but they can’t escape, which is key. At around $26 a piece, they are a bit pricey for a swaddler, but they’re a good quality stretchy fabric that held up beautifully to countless washes and I’ll be able to use them again for the future babes. Overall I am really impressed with the Woombie. I suggest getting two, I thought I’d be able to get by with just one, but boy was I mistaken. Get two, trust me. The houdini is a bit tighter and shorter than the original. So I suggest starting with the original and going from there.
I’m sorry, for this awful picture, but I promise he really did like it better than any other swaddle. This is just the way Asher looked at me or anyone for that matter for the first two months of his life, with deep unbridled concern. In fact, I took this very picture in order to send Rafaan an email, saying something like “this is why you need to be extra affectionate, how would you feel if you spent your day with someone who looked at you like this 95% of the time?”
Thank goodness, he’s all smiles now!
I should also mention that for the first couple months we only took iphone pictures of him, so that’s why all his early pictures are sub par. I’m kicking myself over this, but at least his early months got documented. Lastly, I’ll mention that one of Raf’s favorite things to do was free him from his cocoon after a long nap and to watch him perform an amazing stretch.
Seriously, the woombie was a lifesaver.
A Love Like No Other
Everyone told me that having a baby would truly show me what it meant to love. That nothing would compare and that the love I would feel for that tiny bundle would be like nothing I had ever felt before. When I was pregnant with Asher I knew I loved him, I could feel him inside me and as he grew so did my love for the tiny stranger within me. Once he was born I stared into his eyes and I loved him even more, but I didn’t exactly think that what I was feeling was something new or unfamiliar. I loved him, but I felt it was the same depth of love that I felt for my husband, parents, family and dearest friends. I felt I had been deceived in some way, or that the reality of the feelings that I would have for my son was blown out of proportion. Like it was a story that parents told other parents because it sounded romantic.
Slowly and almost imperceptibly at first that love grew. The more I got to know my little boy, the more my heart swelled with love for him. One day as I looked at his tiny face I was suddenly struck by the enormity of the feelings that I felt for him. I could hardly comprehend the power of my love for this perfect soul. To love someone so completely is something I have never experienced. I ache every time I see my nose and his father’s lips together on his face. Sometimes I literally can not get close enough to him. I want to inhale him and soak him up. I want to bottle the way his skin feels under my finger tips and the way he smells in the grey early morning light, so that years from now, when he is grown, I can be brought back and remember them as vividly as I am experiencing them now.
He is growing so fast, I feel like this precious time with him is slipping away. This time when I am the center of his world. I have never wanted to be the center of anyone’s world, but now that I am, I savor the weight of it. In just one month he will start on solid food and I suspect that will be the first step towards him gaining his independence. I want that for him. I want him to grow up and to leave the nest and to get married and to have babies of his own, but it still aches. The thought of him leaving. He will only be a baby for a year. One, single short year and then he’ll be a toddler, a little boy, a teenager, a man and I won’t be able to sneak into his room at night just to gaze at him and savor the sweet sounds of his breath. That year is nearly half gone already and I can’t seem to comprehend how that even happened. Every day the depth of my feelings for him grows stronger. I already struggle to understand the vastness of how I feel for him and I know that there is no way to even fathom what my love will be for him in 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 years, 2 decades. I feel so incredibly humbled that I get to know this bright soul before anyone else does. I don’t always cherish the moments I have with him. When I’m up with him at 4 a.m. or when he spits up down my shirt I think about how I can’t wait for him to outgrow this stage, too just be a little bit older. But when he’s nursing and gazing at me with those slate grey eyes, I know that I want to hold on to these fleeting second for eternity. I can’t though. I blink and they’re gone, soon to become distant fading memories, clouded by the onslaught of time. My yucky, sticky, sweet, happy little boy.
Decoding Colic
Asher, thankfully never had colic, but about a quarter of all babies do. (1) Parents often ask, what they can do to help their colicky babies and honestly I don’t have any concrete answers. The thing is, no one really knows why colic happens to some babies and not others and what even causes it to begin with. There are just a bunch of theories. It’s kind of like morning sickness, in that it’s still so much of a mystery. The one thing we do know definitively about colic is that: it will go away with time. Although, I realize that that is of little comfort to the exhausted and raw parents of babies with colic.
There are several things that parents can try to reduce the colic however while they may work for some babies they may not work for others, which is part of what makes colic so frustrating to deal with. Not only is your little bundle crying incessantly but you also have to hear story after story from other people about how they did x, y and z and it totally cured their baby, yet when you try the same things you get no result at all, which only adds to your feelings of helplessness and hopelessness and makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong. Well let me set the record straight. You are not doing anything wrong. There is no exact science when it comes to colic, just like there isn’t any when it comes to morning sickness.
Definition:
Colic is defined as excessive crying in an otherwise healthy and thriving baby that lasts at least 3 hours a day, for 3 days a week, for at least 3 weeks. (2) The crying typically starts in the first few weeks of life and ends by the time the infant is 3 or 4 months old (3) however it has been known to last longer than this.
Cause:
There are many theorized causes of colic, which include; infants’ difficult temperament, inadequate or inappropriate mother-infant interaction, maternal anxiety, abnormal gastrointestinal function, allergic problems (mainly cow’s milk allergy) abnormal colonic micro flora, increased infant responsiveness, difficult infant temperament, disturbed infant–parent interaction, maternal smoking while pregnant and maternal and paternal depression. (1) So as you can see, they have pretty much covered all the basis of possible causes, which is just another way of saying that no one really knows why it happens. In rare cases (5.1%), there may be underlying health problems that are presenting as colic, such as central nervous system problems, GI pathology, infections and trauma. (1)
Treatment:
Treatments for colic fall into 3 main categories: dietary, behavioral and pharmacological. (1)
Diet: When dealing with colic usually the first course of treatment is dietary, mainly because it is the simplest approach and seems to make the biggest difference when it does work. The best thing to do from a dietary perspective it to go on an anti-colic diet before colic even sets in. The essentials of an anti colic diet are:
No dairy: especially no milk or cheese
No cruciferous veggies: broccoli, cauliflower, etc
No OJ
No onions or garlic
Low in raw fruits and veggies
Low in soy and wheat
However keep in mind that this may or may not work at treating colic or preventing it from happening, but it is often a good place to start. After a few weeks you can slowly start adding foods back into your diet to see if they have any adverse effects or not.
Behavioral: There are many different behavioral approaches to treating colic, so I’m just going to touch on two of the most common.
5 S’s – Swaddling, Sushing, Side (as in holding babies on their sides), Swaying and Sucking. This is the approach made popular by the author of The Happiest Baby on the Block. It basically involves swaddling your baby tightly, making loud shushing noises in their ear (as loud as the baby is crying, think espresso machine), holding the baby in your arms on his or her side, swaying, rocking or gently jiggling the baby and when all else fails offering them the breast to suck. These 5 steps or some variation there of are really good at calming a crying baby, but they may or may not work at calming a crying colicky baby, still, they are worth a try.
Baby wearing – This involves increasing the time you spend wearing the baby (in a wrap or a carrier) by at least 3 hours. A lot of people swear by this approach and it is definitely nice to cuddle up to your little one, which also allows you to respond promptly to their needs, however there is no supporting evidence in the literature that increased holding reduces crying time in colicky infants but it may in fact increase stress and anxiety in parents. (1) (3) Again, though, you may find that baby wearing is what works best for your baby and actually gives you peace of mind, so I recommend trying it.
Pharmocological: This is the treatment method that shows the least results at improving colic symptoms. Of the drug interventions studied, dicyclomine as shown the most promise, and performed significantly better than the placebo. The use of anti-reflux medication has shown no improvement in the treatment of colic, even though acid-reflux is one of the theorized causes of colic. (1) If you’re interested in this route, I encourage you to talk to your child’s pediatrician about whether or not pharmocological treatment is right for your child’s colic.
Final Words:
In general, the best you can do is reassure yourselves that it will get better with time and to develop predictable feeding and sleeping routines, as this will at least help provide some order and structure. It is tremendously helpful to seek support from other parents who have dealt with colic first hand, because no one really can understand what it’s like unless they have been through it themselves. It is perfectly normal to doubt everything, to hate your child, to feel like you are at your wits end, to want to pull your hair out and to wish you could send the baby back. Talking about these things with other parents who have been through it will help reduce the guilt you may be feeling about feeling these ways yourself and give you a shoulder to lean on. And remember, your baby is just as miserable as you are. I promise you, one day the colic will be over and you will fall in love all over again with this tiny little miracle that you created. Hang in there.
1. Nurko, S. Colic in Infants. Boston: Children’s Hospital.
3. Lucassen, P. (2010). Colic in infants. Clinical Evidence , 0309.
A Picture for Your Sunday // 3
My first Mother’s Day.
Asher’s Monthly Growth Series // 5
