I have a good friend who is pregnant right now (preggers, with child, has a bun in the oven, is in the family way, has a pea in the pod, etc.), so I've been thinking back to my baby days. One thing I have been thinking about is what my best baby book recommendation is for a new mom, and I want to share that with you in case you are pregnant (preggers, with child, have a bun in the oven, are in the family way, have a pea in the pod, etc.) or you have a baby shower to attend and need a gift idea.
The book is called The Happiest Baby on the Block, and here's the back story about how I came to find this book. We have always been VERY lucky in the fact that we had almost all of our baby things handed down to us from my sister-in-law who has 2 kids just slightly older than ours. One of the things that she gave me when I was pregnant with my first child was this book, but it was with a bunch of other stuff and books, so I read the first few pages and then put it aside and kind of forgot about it. Well, once I had my son, Giuseppe, he was a crier. He wouldn't sleep, he would just wake up and cry all night. OMG. It was ridiculous, and I was going crazy. We would lay him down and play classical baby music (we knew nothing) really loudly in our room all night. It would slightly work for a while, but then he would wake up. I'd change his diaper a million times at night thinking that was the problem (again, we knew nothing at this time, it was crazy), and on and on.
I have a very vivid memory of one night that I was out in the living room with Giuseppe because he had woken up crying again, and I knew my hubby had to get up early for work, so I was trying to get him to stop crying away from our bedroom. Well, it was the very late hours of the night, very early hours of the morning, when I started praying to God to just let this kid sleep. Then I remembered this one episode of Friends where Rachel has a new baby and she wakes her up one day, but then the baby starts crying and won't stop. Then Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe are all going crazy looking up ways to get the baby to stop crying. One of them reads in a book that they should hold the baby close to their body and swing it back and forth. Rachel tries it and it works...until she stops. Then the crying starts again, and the hilarity ensues. Then Monica bounce-swings her, and she finally instantly goes to sleep. Anyway, I decided to try it, and it actually kind of worked! I didn't swing him ridiculously like Rachel did, but just normal side to side bouncing, until he finally fell asleep. Yay! Friends saves the day! While I was doing this, deliriously happy that something was working, I recalled reading something about swinging the baby in that The Happiest Baby on the Block book. I located the book, and started reading it in the wee hours of that morning. Then, I had a plan for the next night!
The next night, I looked up white noise of water sounds, and then when Giuseppe started his crying, I played that really loud and started swinging him around in his car seat, and employed the other methods from the book. It worked like magic, and I could not believe it! My quality of life just improved big time!
So, the premise of the book is that babies are born 3 months too early, which is the cause of "colic" and why those babies usually stop their incessant crying after about 3 months. For those first 3 months, these babies need MAJOR comforting, which is where the tricks provided in the book come in. It gives you 5 methods, called the 5 "S's", that you use together to kind of recreate the womb experience to very quickly calm down those little criers. And this is not just for colicky babies, you can use this on any new baby. And I'm telling you, these tricks REALLY work. Like, FOR. REAL.
I'm not going to tell you what the 5 S's are because if I was the author of the book, I'd be pretty mad at me for giving away the goods. SO, if you need a baby shower gift idea (that's actually useful), or you just want to be prepared for when you have your baby, or you just love reading about baby stuff, I'd recommend buying this book. If you don't want to buy the book, check it out at your local library and take some good notes.
Hope I just saved someone from crazy late night screaming (or at least a little bit of it)!
Until next time...
Oh, and here's that part of the Friends episode I was talking about: