to burp or not to burp!

.... is a serious question. Especially when your baby is not sleeping inspite of numerous feeds.

There comes a time, when baby gets tired of sleeping and keeps crying as if its the next best thing it has invented.

Putting-baby-to-sleep is a long and tedious process. And depending on mood of a baby (and also how much hungry it is), it might take forever. You need to feed and also might have to rock them gently towards end of the feed. One can never predict how much time it would take to feed a baby (it seems forever to me). I wish they could come up with some sort of milk indicator, which would show how much more milk is required to be fed.

Most of the time, she becomes limpid after a feed and goes to sleep promptly. In this first case, even if you jump around holding her, she would not really bother to get up. But sometimes (read one of those miserable days when she just won't sleep), she is in sort of trance.... something like half awake and half asleep state. Now that's a tricky situation. If you try to hold her upright and make her burp, it might (and in 99.99% cases it does) woke her up. And then you are back to square one. Ahem!

Yesterday was one of those days. Even after me trying hard, she didn't feel like sleeping the whole night. I was all groggy and wished that she had a mute button.

Aaditya was no help either (which he is usually not, when he is sleeping). Well, he does help me by playing with her in the day time, when he is not working or not reading slashdot or not watching futurama or ..... Ok, he does help me when he is working late..... which comprises mostly of following dialouges,

Oh God, why is she crying so much? (I wish I would know)
I think she needs milk. (she doesn't have much choice, does she?)
hmmm, something is definitely wrong with her. (ah, my dear Sherlock holmes!)
Did you make her burp? (ahem!)
Oh tiger, you need to learn to change her nappies fast enough. (argh! I prefer it, when I am changing nappies alone.)

But when he sleeps, it's a different story. That way he is pretty consistent. You know what to expect when it comes to dealing with gnu. So as I was saying, yesterday he was snoring right next to her. I tried to calm her down by various means, but things were not in good shape. Occasionally, he did get up due to her high volume (which happened only couple of times). so he got up and cooed something like "oh, baby! what's the matter?" or "why are you crying so much dear?" or something to that effect. He then tried to focus around and upon finding me, proclaimed loudly "Oh Man, I am so sleepy!". And he promptly got back to sleep.

As if sitting up whole night holding a bellowing baby is my hobby.