Now, do me a favor. Put your hands over your ears and listen. Do you hear a roaring? What you are hearing is white noise your own body produces within. The same noise your baby heard for 40 weeks or so while in womb.

So, for a second, imagine you are a baby in womb. You’ve spent most of your existence in a place warm and dark, where you were well fed and had no distracting noises, lights or outside stimuli. Then suddenly, you burst on scene and have a whole big world to absorb. The stimuli eventually stresses you out, and since you can’t communicate very well, only way you know how to blow off steam is to cry and cry and cry some more. This is latest scientific explanation of cause of colic. Your baby is over-stimulated throughout course of day. To relieve stress, they cry uncontrollably for several hours. Oh, man.

So what can you do as a parent?

Recreate for your baby feeling of being in womb. Lower lights, reduce visual stimuli, swaddle baby and turn on some white noise. Babies seem to be positively effected by noise frequency of a hair dryer, clothes dryer and vacuum cleaner.

Unbelievably enough, this works! When I first heard about this theory, I was extremely skeptical. But out of desperation one day, I pulled out vacuum cleaner and plugged it in. It was like turning off a water faucet. Immediately, our baby quit screaming. If you unplugged vacuum, she started screaming again. It was weird. But, it worked.

Wait, though! Don’t just plug in your vacuum cleaner and run it for several hours. The noise decibels will damage your baby’s hearing. You need to be able to control volume of white noise your baby is hearing.

White noise downloads and white noise CD’s are available for purchase almost everywhere. Just go on Yahoo! or MSN and do a search for “white noise baby”. For just a few dollars, your baby can have comfort of white noise, and you can have your sanity back.

Patrice Fagnant-MacArthur is editor of The Spiritual Woman Newsletter (http://www.spiritualwoman.net) and author of "Letters to Mary from a Young Mother" (iUniverse, 2004). She has a Masters Degree in Applied Theology from Elms College.