Thankful for the screams

I hate baby screams. My husband says I take them personally, so it's been a rough couple months with our infant son, although the past week has been a dramatically wonderful turn around. He hasn't been colicky; he just hasn't slept the way we expected him to be sleeping and our lack of sleep made, well, lots of things difficult. Among those things were being pleasant, grateful, and compassionate.

But yesterday I was talking to a mom whose 2 y.o. got a stomach bug so virulent that after a couple days she stopped walking. My similarly aged daughter darts around. It's hard to imagine her awake and not moving around (unless there's a TV on). But I remember when she was in the hospital in April and how lethargic she was as well. And this reminds me that as cranky as sleep deprivation made us, our son's crying was well within the healthy baby range.

Not only that, for a period, they were appropriate indicators that he wasn't getting enough milk. Now it took us a number of weeks to seek help and figure that out, but at least we had some kind of warning. How heart breaking would it be to have a weak, listless baby?

As we head into Thanksgiving week, I want to take a look at some of the things I've been bitter about and re-examine them. So first off, I want to be thankful for the cries of our son; instead of really mad that I'm not doing what I want to be doing which is usually sleeping or resting.