Today I found a copy of the first blog I had created, back before everybody had a blog. We didn't call them blogs back then. I think they were called "cotton gins" or "online journals" or something like that. It vanished from the face of the Internet when our ISP packed up and quit. I managed to save the files though, and I read them today for the first time in about four years.

Back then all I ever wrote about was the baby (as opposed to now where only 75% of the entries are daughter-related). Every post was about a new fluid that she squirted out, or some feeble attempt at crawling/walking/not-screaming. There was usually some description of the previous night's attempts at sleep. A few pictures of the happy baby were displayed, but mostly there were a lot of pictures of a somber or crying baby.

Frankly speaking, it was a tremendously miserable time. Our daughter had a condition called colic. Colic is the name that doctors use when they don't know why your baby is crying. That's what my daughter had in spades. Our doctor described her as the most colicky baby he had ever seen. We found that both alarming and reassuring. Eventually I figured out that pediatrics is not really a science. There's no good test that you can do on an infant. You can't ask what hurts, you can't x-ray them, you can't slice them open and peek. All you can do is shine a light into whatever orifice is willing to open and see if there's a big sign that says something like "Root canal. I need a root canal, doc."

Our daughter generally woke up between 4 and 10 times a night for the first 9 months or so. The vast majority of her waking hours were spent screaming at the top of her lungs for no reason that we could determine. I'm not a religious man, but I prayed for death (usually mine) every day for the first year or so. She didn't start to sleep through the night with any regularity until she was 3 or 4 years old.

Things are obviously much better now. However, to punish her for all those screaming days, I will post the very ugliest baby picture that I found on the old blog. Hah! May her future high-school boyfriends find this page.