The Oldest Colic Trick There Is — Finally, a Version That Doesn’t Quit
AS TOLD BY A RETIRED LABOR & DELIVERY NURSE
The Oldest Colic Trick There Is — Finally, a Version That Doesn’t Quit
By a retired labor-and-delivery nurse, grandmother of one · 5-minute read
We used to bicycle their little legs at 2 AM. This holds the same gentle pressure - without me standing over the crib.
"It's what we did with you," my mother said. "Warm the towel, lay it on his belly, hold your hand there." She is eighty-one and she said it like she was reminding me where the spare key is.
Thirty years of other people’s babies
I am a retired labor-and-delivery nurse. I have caught somewhere north of two thousand babies. So when my first grandson came home and screamed for four hours every single evening, I did not panic. I assumed I had seen it before, and I had.
What I had not seen was my own daughter, capable and steady, standing in the kitchen at nine at night with her shirt soaked and her eyes empty, whispering "I don't know what else to do."
"It's just colic," the office told her. "It passes by four months." Four months. Do you know how many evenings are in four months? I counted them once, around 1:47 in the morning, bouncing him in the dark. About a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty nights her husband would come home to a war zone.
"It passes" is not a plan. It's a sentence.
What my mother taught me
So I went back to what my mother taught me, because the women in my family have been settling colicky babies since before the word was fashionable. The warm towel across the belly. The flat of your hand pressed steady on his back. The colic hold, tummy down along your forearm, firm and certain.
None of it is magic. It's pressure. Gentle, even, continuous pressure over the part of him that hurts, which relaxes the gut and tells his whole nervous system the same thing being held tells it: you are safe, I have got you. It is the exact principle behind swaddling, behind the hold every nurse on my floor knew by heart.
The eleven-minute problem
The trouble is the warm towel goes cold in eleven minutes. And your arm gives out long before the baby does.
So I went looking for the version that does not quit. The clinical swaddle wraps cost a small fortune and pin the arms. The vibrating contraptions buzz him awake. The drops, we tried the drops, the drops did nothing but lighten her wallet.
The version that does not quit
Then I found a little band. Cream-colored, soft, a bear's face stitched on the front. It wraps low across the belly and holds that exact even compression, the warm-towel pressure, the colic-hold pressure, hands-free, all night, without ever going cold.
Forty-five dollars. My stethoscope cost more than that in 1986.
Ninety seconds
I am a skeptic by training, so I did not believe it. The first evening I put it on him myself, started the timer in my head the way I used to chart contractions, and waited for the nine o'clock scream.
He fussed for ninety seconds. Then he sighed, that whole-body sigh, and went slack against me. I stood there holding a quiet baby and a forgotten cup of coffee that was, for once, still warm.
My daughter cried. A different kind of crying.
It works out to roughly a dollar a night. The drops cost more and did less. And here is what I keep coming back to, as the nurse who thought she had seen everything: it is not a gadget. It is the oldest trick we have, the steady hand on the belly, finally made into something that does not need a hand.
For the grandmother reading this at 2 AM
I am not telling you this because your daughter is failing. She isn't. She is doing the hardest job there is on no sleep, and the most useful thing a grandmother can hand her is not advice. It's two free hours and a baby who sleeps.
That is the gift I wish someone had handed me, thirty years ago, in my own dark kitchen.
If you are the grandmother reading this at an unreasonable hour, get one for the nursery, and get a second for the diaper bag so it travels. It is $45 for one, or $90 for the 3-pack, and the colic "danger signs" guide and the 30-night money-back guarantee come with every order, so there is nothing to lose but the evenings you would otherwise spend pacing.
Thirty nights. Keep it either way.
One band $45 — or the $90 3-pack: one for the nursery, one for the diaper bag, one for grandma’s house.
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Two thousand babies. And the thing that finally quieted my own grandson was the first thing my mother ever taught me.
Warm the towel. Or don't, and let the band do it for you.