Monday, February 4, 2013

What to do with a screaming baby?

I'm convinced babies don't know their own good. At least not Elin.

She's extremely demanding or picky when it comes to the timing of her food. When she starts to make small grumpy sounds we know that she is hungry. With some luck we then have one minute to get to the fridge, get a pre-filled bottle, run it in the microwave for 30 seconds and get it in her mouth - or else she'll be screaming. If she screams for more than a minute the noise develops to the sound of an inferno.

Not only does she damage the hearing of the rest of us. When she is screaming like that it is impossible to stop her. She can scream for ten minutes with the milk bottle literally in her mouth. I guess she doesn't notice the food has arrived.

In the beginning we did what we could to comfort her to make her stop and start to eat. But quite often that didn't help very much, but the boys just got hungrier in the meantime and perhaps joined the screaming. So now we sometimes just have to leave her doing her thing and feed the other two while it lasts. It's better to have one screaming baby than three!

I also believe Oscar and Filip is getting used to this behavior. Oscar is now quite often just smiling and looking at his sister, perhaps thinking "you're stupid - don't you realize what you are missing?". Filip may look surprised and wondering - but at least it is not that often that he joins the screaming.

I wonder what Elin is winning through this behavior?

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