Gas, Food, Diaper

"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? Maybe, if they screamed all the time for no apparent reason." - Jack Handy

A couple of weeks ago I thought we lucked out and got one of those easy babies. She was sleeping five, six hours at a stretch at night, and seemed happy and content during the day. Alas, it was not to last. Lately she'll wake up in under an hour, for whatever reason: gas, food, diaper, "I just want to be held", and seemingly for no reason at all.

Dr. Spock says that when a baby cries we should attend to her: at this stage in her life she needs to be reassured that the world is a safe place. Dr. Ferber - recently made popular in *Meet the Fockers* - says we should let the baby cry, weather the extinction burst (behaviorism term: increase in a behavior when the reinforcing stimuli is removed), because we have been creating the crying ourselves by reinforcing it. Dr. Karp says calm for the first three months, then the rules change.

I wanted to be a follower of Dr. Spock and Karp, I really did, but it's just too exhausting. Plus, I was a Ferber baby, and if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for Sofi. (Although my dad says he still feels guilty about doing it that way.) She's crying right now. And here I am, writing a blog entry instead of attending to her.

Ah, there, she stopped. Self soothing! Yay Ferber.