In one of the bazillion parenting books* I read while I was pregnant, there was a section on baby hiccups. The author made sure to be very reassuring about the fact that hiccups don't bother your baby one bit and are generally more disconcerting to parents than they are to the child. I expected to fit into this "concerned parent" category, because when I was pregnant, fetal hiccups bugged the crap out of me.
However, now that the baby is actually here, I find that I love Hiccup Time. We have Hiccup Time two or three times a day, and I delight in its arrival and promptly put the baby down in her swing or her crib and go do other things. I usually have about 20 minutes, because Leah is less than a month old and therefore has no concept of hiccup remedies, and encouraging an infant to hold his or her breath is generally frowned upon anyway. Twenty minutes is enough time for me to do a couple of household tasks - dishes, start or fold a load of laundry, clean the cat box (it's amazing how I am much more willing to clean my house now that I spend so much time in it.)
You can chastise me all you want, but the reality is, I very quickly discovered that during Hiccup Time, the baby ABSOLUTELY CANNOT CRY. I've seen her try. Her little face screws up to protest being put down or tickled or changed and then along comes a spasm of her tiny little diaphragm, and out comes the hiccup and the screwball face just disappears. Upon further observation, I noticed that she is surprised by the arrival of each little hiccup as though she didn't expect it, whether it's the first or the fifth or the fiftieth. This makes me even more confident in my actions. I now believe that not only do the hiccups keep her from crying, they're also a source of entertainment that she unwittingly provides for herself. I'm sure her little mind is being constantly stimulated during Hiccup Time: "Woah, what was that?!"... "Whoah, what was that?!"... "Woah, what was that?!"
The look she gets with each little hiccup is a tiny glimmer of hope that she is slowly becoming smarter than the potato. However, I will not be entirely convinced she is going to thrive in this world until she proves herself to be smarter than the cat. Stay tuned.
*Four, one of which I did not finish because it was a week-by-week and Leah was born eight days early and one of which I am still working on. Deep dark secret #15: I am actually a very slow reader. Oh, and there is also a book on breastfeeding that I picked up exactly once to search the index for ", alcohol and".
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