Cry baby
Ugh. Brennan has been having crying fits. They suck. Blair and I will do everything we can think of to calm him down, including: change his diaper, change his outfit, strip him down to his diaper, bundle him up, check his temperature, put him in the swing, lie him on the floor, sit him in the car seat, sit him in the vibrating bouncy chair, play music for him, jiggle toys in front of him, walk around holding him, hold him upright, hold him lying down, rock him in the rocking chair, take him for a drive, strap him to my chest with a special $40 baby wrap, feed him, burp him, turn all the sound off, turn all the lights off, make the "shhhhh" noise that's supposed to sound like the womb, probably five million other things that I can't remember right now, and finally, when we're absolutely desperate and he sounds like someone is actually stabbing him with a kitchen knife, we give up and give him baby Tylenol. Or he falls asleep or stops crying at some random point before it gets that bad. It's a horrible guessing game of "maybe it's THIS, no maybe THIS!" and there's no way to ever know if we guessed right or if he had some random pain that coincidentally stopped at that time. After days of this happening, on and off, my latest and best theory is that the vitamin drops that our doctor insisted are essential are giving him a stomach ache. I won't bore you with why I think so, it's just a bunch of small dull behavioral things that I've noticed. I had decided to stop giving him the vitamins and see if that fixed the issue, but I got worried today, so I called the doctor's office to get the on-call person and see if they thought I should bring him in. First I got a dispatcher who was clearly harried and annoyed, who took my information brusquely and blurted out instructions to me for turning off my caller ID and then hung up. I didn't understand why, and when I tried them they didn't work anyway. So I sat there wondering what the hell was going on and starting to cry a bit, until the on-call doc called me and said it sounds like gas pain, it might be the vitamins (at my suggestion- this is apparently very rare but he admitted that it COULD happen) and that I can use anti-gas drops and/or baby Tylenol. Oh, and to stop giving him the vitamins because they're not that essential and can wait a few months until he grows out of this reaction to them, if that's what it is. All I can figure is that he was calling from home and they don't want us to have his number on our call ID, but they should freaking well find a better way to deal with that problem than blurting out unexplained instructions to sleep-deprived mothers of infants. Jerks. And all for advice that I had already figured out myself. Jerks.