The order isn't decoration. It's the whole trick.

Every parent who's learned the I Love You massage gets the same three letters in the same order — I, then L, then U — and almost nobody gets told why. It isn't a memory trick. It's the actual road gas has to travel, walked in the order it has to travel it.

Why does the order matter more than the shape?

Trace all three letters and they look identical regardless of sequence. Start with the U, or skip straight to it, and you're pushing on a stretch of gut nothing has cleared yet — which is closer to why "the massage didn't work" actually happens than most parents realise.

A dadi who's been rubbing babies' bellies for sixty years never split this into three named moves, and she never did them backwards either. The order was never the part she had to think about — her hand just went the way the gut goes.

That's the whole argument of this post. I, L, U isn't a shape you memorise for our step-by-step guide. It's a direction, done in three passes instead of one.

What path is "I, L, U" actually tracing?

Your baby's large intestine runs up the right side of their belly, crosses to the left under the ribs, then runs back down the left side to the hip — an upside-down U shape, more or less, that gas has to travel the same way stool eventually does.

The "I" traces only the last stretch, the "L" adds the crossing, and the "U" walks the whole route from the start. Vimala McClure's 1978 handbook fixed that order into the training curriculum every certified instructor still teaches from, but the anatomy was never hers to invent — she wrote down a direction that was already there.

It's the same direction we ask you to slow down for anywhere it turns up in a colic massage sequence: with the gut, not across it.

What goes wrong if you skip straight to the U?

You're asking one long stroke to clear the entire route in a single pass, on a stomach that hasn't had the shorter passes loosen anything first. Sometimes it still works. Often it just moves your baby's belly around without moving anything inside it.

The "I" and the "L" aren't warm-up strokes you can skip when you're in a hurry at eleven at night. They're doing the actual work of the near two stretches, so the "U" only has to finish a job already half done.

Our own Gas Relief routine keeps the three in sequence for exactly this reason — it isn't a preference, it's the mechanism. No grandmother ever needed reminding of that; the shortcut is the modern part, not the traditional one.

Does the order actually change whether it works?

Nobody's run the trial that isolates order from everything else a parent does at the same time — feeding position, timing, how fussy the baby already was. The best available review of infant massage in healthy babies under six months found nothing that held up on its own for crying or fussing generally.

What we hear instead is more specific than "it worked" or "it didn't." "If you rub in small circles along the intestine going from the left to the right then yes it does work, but you need to know how to do it," one mother wrote on The Bump forums in August 2011 — which is the entire case for this post in one sentence from someone who wasn't trying to make it.

We won't tell you the order is proven. We'll tell you it's the one detail parents keep independently landing on when the massage works and leaving out when it doesn't.

Where did "I, L, U" get its order?

The malish a grandmother gives never needed English initials to have a direction. It's the letters that are new here, not the road they trace.

What should you take from this?

Do the "I," then the "L," then the "U" — never the reverse, never straight to the last one because you're short on time. Ten to fifteen strokes, in that order, is doing more than the same ten to fifteen strokes scrambled.

If you already know the shapes, this changes nothing about your hands. It just tells you why the sequence you were taught was never the arbitrary part.

Our full step-by-step guide walks the three strokes themselves, pressure and timing included, if you haven't learned the shapes yet.