Knocked Up

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• The Cranky Early Bird

  Axel's an early riser.  He does not seem to be a morning person, though.  He rises at 6:30 and promptly starts screaming.    I'm not sure why he starts yelling.  Is he shocked that the sun's rising earlier and earlier each day?  Angry that he can't see the moon through his window?  Upset that morning means he's going to have to take off his adorable sock monkey pajamas?  Bummed that he's in his crib, with nothing but Good Dog, Carl, a book he's read so often that he could reproduce the pictures in Crayolas if his hand-eye coordination would catch up with his memory, and a stuffed lion that has the same damn straight-mouthed expression on his face every day?    This yelling occurs if he's pooped his pants or if he's saving his poop until sixty seconds before we're ready to rush out the door.  He could be hungry when he wakes up, but the yelling doesn't seem to correlate with a half a multigrain waffle or a four waffle breakfast.   It happens if he's up at 5:45 or if it's one of those rare days when the gods willed him to snooze until 7:00 am.  Read More... Posted Mar 30 2009, 10:48 AM by knockedup with | with 18 comment(s) Filed under: sleep battles, waking up early, sleep disruptions, waking up and yelling, toddlers and sleep

• Secrets of the Inner Ear

  I was under the impression that ear infections are an excruciating experience.  Children with ear infections don't sleep.  They yell for hours in the middle of the night.  Sometimes, I imagined, green goo spurts out like a horizontal geiser.  They are horrible, horrible things, the equivalent of a kidney stone for a toddler.  They cannot be ignored.    Well, I was wrong.  Axel had a red, pus-nurturing infection in his ear, and he acted like it was no big thing.  We found out because we took him to the doctor for a lingering cough.  The hacking, apparently, is nothing.  Though he was walking around sounding like the littlest coal miner suffering from black lung, it's just a post nasal drip cough with a touch of drama.  The real problem was the bad ear infection, which we wouldn't have found out about it were it not for the deceptive cough.    For a few weeks, Axel had been sleeping fitfully.  It was pattern-less fitfullness.  Every second, third, or fourth night, he would wake up between one and three times.  It wasn't every night.  It wasn't getting worse.  It wasn't getting better.  It was just enough to bother me (and Axel), but not enough to rise to the level of concern.  There were two afternoons of low fevers, but the fevers went away in a few hours and Axel was again cheerful - which for him means demanding milk and refusing to eat more than two bites of dinner, then tackling the dog's tail.  Both the sleep disruptions and high temperature blips seemed more like they had to do with teething, a hypothesis reinforced by the two molars grinding through his gums.    A side note on teething: at first, I wondered what all the fuss was about.  I remember getting permanent teeth.  It wasn't that bad.  Then I took a look at those big, flat molars, drilling through Axel's virgin gums, and realized that this kind of teething is not the same as permanent teeth.  I don't even like getting poked by the dental hygenist's instruments, so if someone suggested that I suck it up while a lumpy, irregular piece of bone drove through a part of my mouth, I'd be a little cranky, too.  It's amazing that Axel isn't more pissed off the constant budding of new teeth.     After we got the pink bottle of liquid amoxicillin - which Axel guzzles down like its chocolate milkshake - and started the doses, Axel improved.  He's slept through the night for a week straight.  He started kissing my nose.   But I'm left wondering how I'm supposed to know if he's really sick or not.      Read More... Posted Mar 15 2009, 08:49 PM by knockedup with | with 12 comment(s) Filed under: sleeping through the night, teething, ear infection, sleep disruptions, molars