Mother's little helper: the Hoover
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The crying started in the early evening, a few days after we brought our new son home. It shook up the household, pounded on our eardrums, turned the baby beet red, stopped a few hours later, and reemerged like clockwork the next night. And I knew I was in for it.
Ah, colic, the fussies on steroids - that mysterious ailment that, by some estimates, affects one in five newborn babies. Lucky mommy that I am, I'd lived through it before. My daughter, now 4, cried from roughly 5 to 11 p.m. for the first three months of her life.
At the time, I read up on every theory around - that colic stems from tummy aches or overstimulation or, as one book suggests, from babies emerging from the womb undercooked and consequently annoyed. Though the word "colic" derives from "colon," a minority of babies have a true gastrointestinal problem, says Dr. Christopher Duggan, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who confirms that modern medicine has no clear idea of colic's cause.
When he sees colicky infants at Children's Hospital, Duggan says, he checks to see that nothing serious is wrong, and then he offers empathy. The rest is up to the babies, he says. "Infants grow out of colic when they learn to self-regulate environmental stimuli."
I'm all for self-reliance, but it doesn't stop your infant from yowling all night like a crazed wolf pup. When my daughter had colic, my husband worked nights, so alone, I endured. I walked the floors and bounced the baby on an exercise ball. I sang idiotic songs in hopes of lulling her to sleep. I outfitted her crib with a sheep that made the sound of ocean waves. Nothing worked for long.
So when the fates granted me a second colicky baby, I braced myself for several months of woe. Then one night, while cleaning our downstairs, my husband remembered hearing that some babies liked vacuum sounds.
This was not a solution I would have stumbled on, my husband later pointed out, since I only vacuum under duress. But he brought the machine upstairs, turned it on, then called me into the room. Our son was lying on the bed in a sort of a trance, utterly relaxed. On one hand, I was thrilled. Still, I felt a little hurt. My baby doesn't need me after all, I thought. He needs a Hoover Nano Lite.
I quickly got over my jealousy, though. The quiet was too appealing. Some theorize, it turns out, that the vacuum whirs at the frequency of blood rushing from the placenta. Duggan says that would depend on the mother's heart rate, but I'm willing to believe.
Now, I know what you're thinking: "I could make a fortune off of this!" Sorry, but the market is saturated.
Or you can go with a mom-and-pop operation. Cherie Stirewalt, a graphic designer from Shiloh, Ill., discovered the value of a vacuum cleaner when her daughter, now 10, had colic for eight months. Her father, who owned good recording equipment, made her a tape of the noise. She gave it to a friend a few years later, and a business plan was born.
Now, Stirewalt sells CDs and MP3s of vacuum cleaner sounds (they're titled "Colic Sweep," and available on iTunes), plus a short download of hair dryer noise. She runs a website called colic-baby-bootcamp.com, and is about to quit her day job to be a full-time purveyor of colic relief. "Hopefully I've helped people," she told me. "I call myself a colic baby survivor, giving people the tools that they need."
Our family chose a homegrown solution: a rudimentary recording on an MP3 player, which I ran one night on continuous loop on my laptop. In truth, listening to hours of deafening vacuum noise isn't much fun, either, but at least only one of us felt like crying.
Fortunately, our son responds to other forms of white noise, too. The fan in the bathroom light fixture works in a pinch, and every radio in our house is set to static. Our evenings are now a symphony of fuzz. It's not the sound of silence, but it's the next best thing.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com
