yuck

I haven't blogged in two months and for some reason I wait until I have something really icky to write about. Being sick. Yuck in so many ways. The experience of having one clogged nostril and the other running like a river down your face into your mouth is literally yuck, and the other yuck is just feeling yuck. And the worst part is that Baby Boy is also feeling yucky. :( Poor guy. So far, the hardest part of mother hood is having a sick child (not waking up three times a night or trying to figure out what a continually crying baby is asking for). It's being sick. I started fighting this darn cold more than a week ago, and I thought that, with enough rest and vitamin C I would fight it off. Wrong. My immune system finally succumbed to its challenger and I caught the cold. And so did Baby Boy. Two nights ago was the absolute worst. Me, Baby Boy and Daddy were up til 3 in the morning. Baby Boy wanted to nurse SO bad, but couldn't because his nose was so clogged. He would nurse, gag, pull off and cry...so hard. I felt so bad and so helpless. We kept trying to nurse and finally gave up and fed him rice cereal at midnight. Fortunately he ate it or I'm not sure what we would have done.

So, 1 a.m. rolls around and he's been up since about 10, and it's been nothing but crying, pacing the house holding Baby Boy while he was crying and doing everything we could think of to calm him down. Daddy played him the guitar. For the first time ever, that didn't work. I sang to him, tried to lay him in bed with me to go to sleep (which ticked him off), sucked the boogies out (which REALLY ticked him off) walked him around the house, tried nursing him, giving him the bottle...we tried everything. At 1 a.m.,an hour after the rice cereal feeding, I put Baby Boy in the car. It's the only way to calm him down sometimes. Immediate silence in the backseat, and after 10 minutes of driving (which, in my given sick, half-awake state of mind, I really probably shouldn't have been), I headed home. I carried the carseat into the nursery, transported him into his crib, tiptoed out and crawled into bed...until 2 a.m. 45 minutes of sleep...I can't complain...it's the most I had gotten all night. He cried in my arms til 3 (which felt like an eternity) and then I did the one thing I should have done to calm him down a long time ago. I stood in front of the mirror, holding him so he could see his reflection, and alas, a smile! We stood there for a good 10 minutes because it was the only tool I seemed to have that let him forget just how upset he really was. After that, for Baby Boy, it was playtime. I gave him my Tylenol bottle, which he found very entertaining. It's not a fun feeling when your baby makes a new discovery at 3 in the morning and you're hardly coherent enough to be happy. But, I was happy. He discovered that he could use the Tylenol bottle as a shaker, so he just kept shaking it (did I mention he had a smile on his face the whole time? After so many hours of crying, what a relief...) The smile made me happy, but his calm nature made me crave the bed even more. He's happy so it's time to go to sleep, right? I was sick, I felt miserable and that's all I wanted to do. So, Daddy went to bed in our bed and Baby Boy and I slept in the guest bed. I propped him up on some pillows and hoped for the best. He woke up every hour or so after that, and I'd just lean over and nurse him until he fell back to sleep. So, needless to say, neither one of us got very much sleep, but Baby Boy is such a trooper...he was full of energy the next day (until his two-hour nap, which is not at all typical). So, I learned a valuable lesson. It doesn't matter how sick you are or how little sleep you've gotten or how hard you pray that your little one goes to sleep. He still needs you, and that's what keeps you going. Running on fumes somehow feels like a full tank. And it's totally worth it.