The other day someone on Dayre mentioned the term “high needs baby”.

I’d never heard of it before so I googled. I got on this blog and… holy shit this is a revelation!

Pop Quiz: Do you have a High Needs Baby?

Do any of the following sound familiar?

Your baby would rather observe the world around her from the vantage point of your arms (While in a sling. Bouncing. And nursing.)
My answer:  OMG yes.  Except sometimes she doesn’t even need the sling, silly mommy.  Just bare arms will do they’re so much comfier than some silly nylon carrier!

When he’s hungry, wet, irritated, overwhelmed, or bored, he isn’t shy about letting you know, long and loud.
A: Yep! Especially when she’s overwhelmed.  When there’s too many new faces and too much noise.  Not only does she let me know how she feels more than adequately, she lectures me for at least five minutes after that too.

Sleeping through the night is a term you think you’ve heard before, but certainly haven’t experienced anytime recently.
A: Actually touch wood but Penny’s been pretty good at night! But maybe it’s because she rarely naps for more than 30 minutes at a time in the day so by the time night falls, she’s exhausted. -_-

His nicknames all include the words fuss, cranky, or grumpy in some way, shape or form.
A: OMG how you know!? We call her Grumpy Pants, Grumpy Cat, Miss Grumps and So Much Anger In This Little Body.

You don’t understand the phrase “Enjoy the newborn stage, it’s passes so quickly”. To you that’s like saying “Enjoy having your appendix removed, the recovery period passes so quickly”.
A: Yea totally.  I’m counting down to when she can speak so she can tell me WHAT SHE’S ANGRY ABOUT. T____T

After doing a whole bunch of reading on this (i.e. I spent an hour on Google), I am pretty sure Penny is a high needs baby.

Who, me? *innocent*

Dr Sears was the first person to coin this term and I read through his article 12 Features of a High Need Baby.  Every line I read seemed to nearly describe Penny to a T!  Words like “intense”, “draining”, “demanding” flew up at me and really rang a bell.

One line in particular:

Isn’t a contented baby the hallmark of effective mothering? Wrong! There will be days when you nurse, rock, walk, drive, wear, and try every comforting technique known to man or woman, and nothing will work. Don’t take this as a sign of failure. You do the best you can, and the rest is up to the baby. You have not failed as a mother even if your baby is miserable much of the time. This is simply part of his personality.

Yes, Miss Grumpy, I do believe that is just your personality.

Another trait was “super sensitive” and “cannot be put down”.

High need babies are keenly aware of the goings-on in their environment. “Easily bothered,” “quickly stimulated,” “like walking on eggshells” is how parents describe their sensitive babies. High need babies prefer a secure and known environment, and they are quick to protest when their equilibrium is upset. They startle easily during the day (for example, we learned not to turn on the blender if Hayden was anywhere nearby) and settle with difficulty at night. While you can carry on normal family life without waking most sleeping infants, these babies often awaken at the slightest noise. Super-sensitive infants are unlikely to accept substitute caregivers willingly.

Yes loooo.  When I had our aircon units serviced, the sound of the cleaning machine pissed Penny off royally so we had to sequester her to the furthest corner of the house from whichever unit was being cleaned.   And when we brought her to Kim and Gareth’s baby Liam’s birthday party, she yelled the minute we stepped into the house.  I guess there were too many new people and sounds around and she didn’t like the new place wtf sorry Kim.

She screamed all the way until I brought her upstairs to a guest room, away from all the stimulation to recover.  And even then she sniffled away in my arms, and kept working herself up so she’d scream at two minute intervals FML max.

Another sentence in Dr Sears was this:

High need infants tend to be full-time tummy-thumpers and bladder- kickers, as if telling the world even before they’re born that they need more space.

Omg really! In my tummy she was ALWAYS moving and kicking.  In fact there wasn’t a time where I felt worried about her at all (as opposed to certain days with Fighter when I didn’t notice him move) because she was always reminding me she’s there. I was very grateful that she was reassuring me but now I know it’s just her forceful personality hahahaha.

So basically Penny is an okay baby… until she’s not happy or wants something.  Then all hell breaks loose wtf.  When she cries, it’s not a cry of pain or fear.  It’s anger.  Her little body tenses up, she arches her back, she yells with as much as strength as she can muster, and she goes on for a long time, until her emotion is spent.

She cries on car rides (IKR which baby hates car rides!?); hell, she cries even in the car seat.  She cries when I put her in a lying down position cos she always wants to be upright and look at stuff.  When feeding, if flow too slow, cry.  Flow too fast, cry.  Accidentally come off the nipple, cry.  When we take her out of the bath, she cries cos she loves bathing. When putting lotion on her face, she cries.

And sometimes for no discernible reason at all, she cries.  Then a few minutes later she recovers without us ever figuring out why.

A study was done on the ‘difficult child’ which followed 141 children from birth through to elementary school, looked at various personality traits, and the extent to which the children exhibited the following 9 traits:

• The level of motor activity
• The regularity of functions such as eating, elimination, sleeping and wakefulness
• The response to a new objects or people (do they accept it or withdraw)
• The adaptability to changes in the environment
• The threshold or sensitivity to stimuli
• The intensity of responses
• The child’s general mood or disposition (cheerful, grumpy, serious, friendly, etc.)
• How distractible the child is
• The attention spam and level of persistence they display when engaged in an activity

The children were categorized into three – Easy, Difficult and Slow to Warm Up. Upon reading, I’m pretty sure Penny is Difficult la hahahaha.

More reading indicated that the best way for parents to cope is to adopt an “adaptive, flexible style of parenting”. Which is what I find myself doing now.

Quite different from parenting Fighter who can be considered an easy baby, I baby wear Penny a lot, or just plain carry her throughout the day, co-sleep, use a swing for naps (which I swore I’d never use), use a specific bottle for feeding (Fighter was fine switching bottle types, and switching from bottle to breast), and do elaborate sleep rituals wtf.

(Mine is cradle her, turn on a lullaby on the baby monitor, say SHHH until I got oxygen deprivation, swing her from side to side, while bouncing myself around the room.  With one hand ready to catch the pacifier she may spit out in anger any moment. OMG FML hahahaha)

We also don’t really dare take her out of the house now lest we disrupt her routine.  Also because she doesn’t take well to public environments. And every night at clockwork I put her to bed at exactly the same time, while doing the same things (see elaborate sleep ritual)

A lot of people especially older folks think I’m spoiling her, but really.  This is the only way we’re surviving wtf.  Reading all these articles on high need babies, other parents of high need babies are saying the same thing.  Observations and studies have shown this is the most effective style when it comes to high need babies which is great news!

Slowly but surely, I see our efforts paying off. But touch wood hor don’t suddenly F me over again ah universe.   Penny has been having longer and more frequent periods of cheerfulness.  We’ve learned to read her cues better, so we’ve been able to preempt some meltdowns.

Normally I need to let her cry it out for at least half an hour every night before she goes to sleep -_- but for the past two nights she did not! Today she whimpered a little bit but my fabulous shushing and swinging lulled her off to sleep before she could full blown melt down.

And yesterday even better! I picked her up and she did not cry.  In fact, she nuzzled my boobs and quietly breastfed herself to sleep. :O :O (Normally I have to let her cry herself to sleep before dreamfeeding her.)

I say all her negative points but she has some wonderful traits too.  When not grumpy, she’s VERY smiley.

She loves it when people talk to her.  She starts smiling like crazy and “talks” back in her baby babbles.  She loves it when you blow raspberries at her or make weird throat noises.  She does it right back at you — I didn’t know five month old babies could replicate the same sounds!

When she’s in her tantrums I feel like dying.  But when she smiles and babbles at me everything else just melts away . :))))  Is this an unhealthy relationship lolol.

Milestone achieved btw!  At 4.5 months Penny sat up by herself for the first time!  Here she is, looking very nonchalant about it.  She damn cool lo. Hahaha.

And here’s me and her on Periscope.  It’s my new favorite app!  Follow me at @fourfeetnine for snippets of me, Fatty, Fighter and High Needs Baby. 😀