If you have ever had a colicky baby, you know how desperate you can become for answers on why your baby won’t stop crying.

That was my husband and me in January 2022 with our first baby.

After an intense birth, we thought we were in the clear to relax and enjoy our new life as a family of 3.

Much to our surprise, the enjoyment phase ended pretty quickly as we noticed how much our daughter cried. And I’m not talking about normal baby crying.  

She wasn’t soothed by nursing, sleeping, cuddles, or a diaper change. She couldn’t even handle being laid on her back for a diaper change without screaming at the top of her lungs. And forget car seats and strollers. More often than not, she fell asleep only due to pure exhaustion after we put in her a carrier and bounced aggressively on a yoga ball, and awoke again wailing like she was in the worst pain of her life. 

Her most notable symptoms were excessive spit up and projective vomiting, mucousy diapers, very painful gas, arching her back when nursing and refusing to nurse, constant crankiness and fussiness, sleep disturbances, clinginess, needing to be upright for sleep, and inconsolable crying and screaming (so bad that we had to come home early after one day on a work trip with my husband and I had to call the local pediatric ER). 

I’ve heard that colic is not a diagnosis, but a symptom, and, I’d say our daughter’s colic was due to 3 major things: birth trauma, reflux, and food sensitivities. We only came to that conclusion after 4 months of trying everything under the sun and closely monitoring her symptoms. Even still, those “diagnoses” are just an educated guess based on what worked and what didn’t. 

We spoke with several medical providers, did hours upon hours of research, and tried things we never heard of before. The truth is, no one really knows what causes colic, or even how to “fix” it. You kind of just throw everything but the kitchen sink at it and hope that something sticks. 

And that’s what we did. 

There were times I thought this phase would never end and that we were stuck in this hell forever. But, things got better very slowly over time, even if they regressed sometimes too.

So in saying that, I wanted to create this post as a place to “dump” all of our attempted colic remedies. I always said we “literally tried it all” and I think this post will show that. And if helps to give you more ideas for your colicky baby – great! I truly hope something (anything) helps because I know how dark these times are. 

Here’s what we tried in no particular order:

Looking in our rearview with those colic days behind us, what helped us most was a ”tincture of time”. Some parents, however, can see massive improvements with one or a combination of things listed above. For us, as our daughter got older, her gut matured, she was better able to communicate with us, and she was more receptive to distractions that would lighten her focus on the discomfort she experienced. I also healed from leaky gut, which I’m sure played a role as well. It was a long and slow journey to where we are now, even if at times it felt like it would never end. I can finally look back and be thankful for these difficulties because now I see beauty in the mundane.