Sweet baby John has been having a rough time at night for the past couple of weeks. And when I say John is having a rough time, that means this mommy is having a rough time, too. He’s been waking up 2-3 times a night… sometimes to eat, sometimes from horrible gas pains. I’ve been giving him the gas drops and some gripe water as well, but to no avail.
Last night was awful. The baby woke up about an hour after I fell asleep, so I fed him. I was so tired, however, that as I was sitting straight up feeding him, I fell back asleep for a couple of hours. Don’t worry, he rests comfortably in my arms while he’s eating, and I have him positioned in such a way that he can’t fall out of my grasp.
At any rate, since I fell asleep while I was feeding him, I didn’t get to burp him. So about 45 minutes or so after I woke back up and laid him back down to sleep, he woke up shrieking and arching his back. Poor baby. I brought him into our bed and massaged his tummy, moved his legs around, basically doing anything to help him get the gas out. It took about 45 minutes for him to pass the gas, and he was shrieking in pain the entire time. It’s so hard to see your baby cry like that! After that, I just held him and rocked him for a while until he calmed back down.
We’re still not sure why he’s waking up from gas pains. I make sure to burp him, but sometimes even after 10 minutes of trying, I can’t get a burp out. We thought maybe he was getting really hungry, so we started him on solids (rice cereal) a few days ago, but that didn’t help either. There’s nothing new in my diet that would cause him to have so much gas at night. I suppose all we can really do is wait for this phase to pass.
In the meantime, I hope I can somehow catch up on my sleep… it’s hard to function being so tired!
