There is perhaps no sound more grating on adult ears than that of an infant crying. During one experiment, participants listened to a recording of a baby howling, and afterwards had to guess how long it had lasted. Everyone estimated as least twice as long as the actual duration.

After our daughter was delivered, she was alert but quiet. We thought we had been unusually blessed ... until she became hungry.

In the ensuing weeks, she cried considerably due to breastfeeding problems. But finally, after a few months, her feeding issues resolved, and she slept through the night. Teething didn't faze her, she sucked her fingers to self-soothe, and she snoozed well in her own room at four months. We breathed a sigh of relief.

Enter baby No. 2.

"What's that sound?" my husband exclaimed shortly after our son was born. Our newborn was half-shrieking, half-screeching. Normally a baby's cry sounds a lot louder to his or her parents than to anyone else. But at our son's two-week checkup, his loud piercing yelps definitely caused heads to turn.

We tried nearly everything to soothe him. First, the basics:

(A) Diaper changed? Check.

(B) Got milk? I even reached the point where I was feeding him every two hours, to no avail.

(C) Rested? The more he cried, the less rest he got, and the less rest he got, the more he cried.

On to other ideas. We ran a hair dryer for the white noise, but he only stopped bawling momentarily to check out the new sound, then resumed wailing. He couldn't stand the automatic swing. Music didn't calm him. He was too young to suck his fingers, and we were reluctant to start a pacifier habit.

Even my mother-in-law, a master at soothing little ones, was worn down. One evening she finally got him to sleep, only to have him wake up a minute later when the door clicked behind her.

Our newborn was seemingly only able to catch some ZZZ's via a few ways:

(1) Nursing (but he was supposed to be eating then, not sleeping).

(2) Being held by my dad (but both sets of grandparents reside on the Mainland).

(3) Swaddling (but soon little Houdini would learn how to undo the wrap).

"Do you think he's colicky?" my husband eventually queried.

"No," I replied, but a few weeks later he found me desperately reading about colic in one of our childcare books.

As the months dragged on, our son continued to wake up every three to four hours around the clock, even after switching a few feedings to formula and starting solids. Finally, at nearly seven months, I was exhausted and decided to let him cry it out at night. He would howl, sometimes for as long as an hour and a half, and our hearts would break.

Now, however, he usually only wakes up for short howling spells before falling back asleep. It's not perfect, and even just a few weeks ago during one of his crying jags a stranger hissed at me, "It's horrible!" However, to us (maybe we're going deaf?) it's a big improvement. Of course, now he is starting to teethe...

Monica Quock Chan is a freelance writer who lives in Honolulu with her husband and children.