Cries and whispers

Does Cleo cry? Of course she does: usually when she wants some time at the breast, but also (like many babies) in the early evening, when nothing seems to calm her. Last night I held her and played a section of the Concierto de Aranjuez (a 1939 composition by the Spaniard Joaquin Rodrigo) on our nursery CD player. Nothing doing; Cleo wailed until her bottom jaw trembled; she cried in waves, and she cried with eyes open, and with eyes shut.

Certainly it's hard to hear, but, trying not to avoid using pacifiers this early in her life, we've decided to simply hold her, rock her, and let her rip during such jags. Eventually, she always calms down, and in fact slept like a rock for 3 hours after her fit last night. This morning, though, I read a 1988 New York Times article on babies' cries that makes the simple point that babies' cries vary substantially in pitch. A normal baby's cry, for those of you keeping score at home, is roughly an A below middle C. If a baby's in sharp pain, the pitch rises - and in fact some babies occasionally issue an ultra-high wail (comparable, says the Times, to a whistling teapot) that indicates acute distress.

We haven't heard that last one yet, and I hope we never do. So far, her cries have been rather modest: they tug at our heartstrings, perhaps, but they certainly don't seem to indicate any real trouble. Which may be why I found myself imagining, as the Concierto played on and Cleo cried, that she was simply a really boorish member of the audience: seated in the back row, perhaps, in her a discount seat, cell phone not turned off, occasionally opening wrapped candies and talking in inappropriately loud tones about the performance. Untrained ushers, we don't really know how to handle such customers, and so - perhaps to the consternation of the other listeners (our neighbors) - we more or less let her go while we're at home.

It's okay, we whisper, it's okay. There's no need to cry, Cleo. You're fully loved.