Cries(is) of Confidence

So my candidate for most gut-wrenching new mother experience is my all-too-slowly developing ability to read Freya's cries correctly. Is there anything worse than seeing your baby in apparent agony and not being able to figure out how to make it better? Half the time I end up crying right along with her...

"Eh-la", usually delivered in a vaguely mournful, and increasingly more urgent cadence, is Freya's cry for food. It stops the second I put her in ready position, which constitutes our first proper conversation: signal and response :-)

Then there is the sudden screech, after waking from a nap: sometimes that means she is too hot, especially after having slept against my skin in the triple-digit heat we have been "enjoying" in California. Another good candidate for what's wrong is a full diaper, and those cries have taken on an indignant character now that we have switched to cloth diapers during the day. If it's neither of those two, we just wing it and try various diversions.

Her hiccups sound bad, and look even worse, what with the inch-deep indentation of her diaphragm, but don't seem to bother her, thank goodness.

Not so the high-pitch scream/desperate gulp combo that we first encountered the second night at home -- when Freya was hungry and my milk not yet in -- and again the other afternoon with what appeared to have been her first bout with colic. Hour after hour of pitiful, inconsolable crying like that, with Freya turning lobster red all over and writhing in apparent pain, wore me down. In German we call this cry "zum Steinerweichen", meaning the ability to melt rocks -- needless to say I was reduced to a puddle after the first hour. Eventually my mother managed to soothe her, and we later figured out that it must have been something I ate. We modified my diet, and so far, no further colicky episodes.

Anyway, it's been an instructive four weeks. I used to consider myself a fast learner, but not nearly fast enough to make things right by Freya in time every time. I also have my first pet peeve of new motherhood: The Secrets of the Baby Whisperer book, which makes it sound as if it should be easy and straightforward to read your baby's body language, and made me feel like a dolt for about half an afternoon, after which I threw the book in a corner to be burned along with my maternity pants.