4 years with Aiden: The first year

I could make this a sappy post and tell how blessed we are to have had Aiden--and we are...but I don't think that would quite encompass what the past 4 years have been like, or who our child is for that matter. You see, God blessed us with what some would have called colicky in the "old" days...today we call them "high needs" babies. In order to really write about the past four years I have to take the bad with the good...because the bad has really shaped me more than the good, I think God just seasoned a bit of our time with sweet smiles and soft coos because I needed some positive feedback in order to make it to year 4. Most days looked like this:


To prep for Aiden's birth I read all kinds of books. I started with Babywise. The flaw with this theory is it doesn't tell you how long a baby should cry-it-out. Aiden has inherited stubborness from someone--I like to claim it's his father's fault, but anyone who knows me would scream liar right about here. And it would be a valid accusation. So then I went for the gentler approach and had a lot of success with swaddling, swings, and slings...but still, I couldn't seem to find one book that had all of the answers for me. I finally stopped reading the books and started observing my son.

0-1 year: I spent my time alternating between threatening to sell our colicky baby on e-bay and knowing in my heart that even on our roughest days I couldn't live without him. Then I'd move on to self-loathing because I couldn't possibly be a good mother if I had thoughts about selling our screamer on e-bay, or just tossing him out of the window. I knew I could never ever hurt my baby, but I could see how shaken baby syndrome could happen. For example, most babies sleep in the car, right? Not mine...I asked our pediatrician at the time if we could take a 10 hour car trip with a newborn, his response was that this was the best time to take such a long trip because he'd sleep the whole way...One hour into the 10 hour trip I was ready to call the pediatrician and let him listen to the heartrending screams I had been listening to for the past hour. By hour 5 I was weeping with him and swearing to my husband that we were never doing this again. The only times he didn't scream were when we stopped to feed him and the last hour of the ride where he finally fell asleep...The ride home was a lot of the same. It has slowly gotten better over the years, but he does not fall asleep in the car very easily--and if I have to stop for a bathroom break those eyes pop right open...so even today I don't have the blissful child passed out in the back seat for long trips--but at least he's learning to entertain himself by waving to cars we pass (it took me awhile to figure out that the truckers weren't honking at me anymore--now they're just honking for my son...ahhh, how times change!)

We were occasionally rewarded with smiles--this is the first one we caught on camera, and these smiles kept us hoping that maybe, just maybe we were doing something right.