This is a post about nothing.
Read on if you're not swamped with life.
Saturday night.
Simon was on call (a terrible euphemism for being at the hospital for 24+ hours with little to no hope for sleep) and I was at home with the kids wondering (like always) if residency would ever ever ever feel "worth it" (jury out forever, probably).
Ahhhh. The big kids had been put down with relatively no resisitence so I celebrated by snapping a real professional in the mirror of my thorax, Theo, and Theo's chin skin to send to Kayla because she sent Theo those adorable pajams ....
Shortly after our shoot I got him down without our usual three hour battle of the wills and was settling in for a nice read of the internet when Julia started crying. I rolled my eyes super dramatically for all to see and went to give her a sip of water. Before I had even walked out of her room she burst into tears again. I told her to go to sleep and that if she woke up Sebastian I would never forgive her because when Sebastian wakes up - Sebastian is ready to GO for the day -- even if that wake time happens to be at 9:02 pm the night before.
Back to my lair with my laptop and she started crying AGAIN. I angrily speedwalked downstairs to threaten Dora doll take aways when I noticed her face was super blotchy by the light of my phone. She was crying really loud and really hard by now so I took her out to the living room to try to calm her down. She told me her stomach hurt and this wasn't my first rodeo so I went to grab the big plastic orange bowl just in case. More crying. I texted Simon that I was maybe a little worried. What he was going to do miles away on Labor and Delivery I don't know but he needed to know my plight.
Julia is many things but she generally is not a liar and my mind was starting to wander reallllllly far and reallllllly fast because she wouldn't stop crying realllllllly hard so I asked her a series of questions - one of them being if she had gotten into some medicine? She said yes through her sobs and I freaked. I ran to make sure my medicines were all in their usual REALLY HIGH UP homes and they were. I asked her to show me the medicine she got into and she took me to the basement and wanted to watch Dora.
oh. I did say generally not a liar.
Simon called and I started inspecting her body for a rash? Do her eyes look glazed over? They do! Something must be really wrong. Maybe she's allergic to avocados when she eats three in one sitting like she did at dinner? More crying. I was trying really hard to be nice and coddly while asking her to PLEASE be quiet because if the boys woke up my arms weren't going to multiply but my brain might actually explode. Still crying and completely inconsolable. I finally walked her to her room and plopped her in her crib where she fell asleep immediately.
oh, again.
No fire? So I sat in the living room with the vom receptacle waiting for alarm number 4 to sound ...
Nothing. Silence. Even Theo maintained his post at sleepcity.
I went back upstairs and started chewing on my cuticles and let the lack of hysterics worry me because I'm a mom and I am completely insane. Should I go make sure she's breathing?
No!
Yes.
Um, no.
Definitely, maybe.
No!
So I did. She was breathing loud and clear and her throat hadn't closed up or anything totally out of the realm of possibility but not out of the stretches of my imagination. She cried a few more times throughout the night but was perfectly and totally fine and probably just overtired from talking through her nap instead of sleeping.
I'm normally lax to a fault when it comes to the kids and I promise I don't usually turn into Clara Barton on the battlefield at the first sign of a sniffle but call weekends bring out the crazy/worst/worst/crazy/fauxmedicaldegree/crazy in me.
It's a really good thing they are so few and far between.
Caps lock and .......
WINK.
ohmigosh! I so totally understand your plight! Yesterday I noticed a bruise on Alayna's tummy. When I felt it there was a knot underneath it. I freaked! Totally. Richard promised me it was totally fine and I believe him because he has a degree in...oh wait, NOT medicine! And I don't believe him AT ALL! But my daycare provider, who has been in the biz for something like 30ish years said she thought it was fine also. So I am trying frantically not to call my ped and freak out over the phone, demanding an immediate and urgent appointment. Argh! Then my provider very kindly pointed out that after 4 children I should be much less neurotic about these things. Really? Thank you, Captain Obvious! Hope you get a better night's sleep tonight!
ReplyDeleteLove the line about Bashy waking up for the next day...the night before. Little munchkin!
ReplyDeleteOh Julia! If it makes you feel any better, when Ellen was little she ate some dirt and I called poison control because I convinced myself that it was full of deadly fertilizer (which it was not). Oh how I don't care any more.
ReplyDeleteYou know, one thing I frequently find myself thinking after reading your posts is that you just don't have enough children and they aren't close enough in age. So you might want to get on that ;)
ReplyDeleteMy kids are 8 and 10 years old now and if there is one thing I always take seriously, it is "My stomach hurts!" First I ask if they need to go potty, if that doesn't help, then we get out the puke bucket. 90% of the time, nothing happens, but after ignoring it once and getting puke all over the bed, floor and her favorite blanket...I don't take any chances!
ReplyDeleteTheo is started to chunk up!! Go Theo!!!
ReplyDeleteAwesome post - they all are.
My take away from this post.... How do you get your kids to actually puke in the bowl?!??! My daughter totally knows what it's for but somehow can only vomit if she is directly facing me in a deathgrip hug... She's almost 2 and never puked anywhere but on me... Maybe I'm doing something wrong??
ReplyDeleteha! I don't know if she ever has ... I guess I thought I was being smart but the odds of her actually utilizing were probably slim!
DeleteFor when they're really little, I would drape the pillow and their lap/blankets/bed with big beach towels. It's way easier to catch it on a bigger surface. Otherwise, when they've already been sick once & I'm waiting for more, I'll sit with them on my lap, facing away from me (watching too much Netflix) with bowl/bucket in hand. Then I can put it right in front of them and my success rate goes way up.
DeleteOur oldest didn't start puking into the bowl until after three, maybe halfway to four? Until then we use a lot of towels.
DeleteI hate puking children. Wait, that sounds wrong. I hate it when children puke. Is that better?
The worst is when they run to the bathroom and puke right IN FRONT OF the toilet. Like..why would you do that? Why? dude you were so close.
Deleteisn't it ironic?
it's like rain on your wedding day. its a free ride when you've already paid. its when you miss the john with your vomit spray. who would've thought..it figures.
love theo's pjs! i am going to be an awful hypochondriac mother, i would have been on the phone with the pediatrician or frantically searching webmd for help (never good). glad she was a-ok!
ReplyDeleteWe're dealing with this with our two-year-old! He'll randomly wake up in the night and start crying and won't be consoled. I'm almost positive it's night terrors (my oldest had the same at this age) but gosh, it doesn't get any easier!
ReplyDeleteLove those sweet little jammies on him! They seemed soooo tiny when I bought them. Funny he's only just now starting to fit them. Also, he has the best hair.
ReplyDeleteA lot of times when Wes wakes up he'll tell me he's going to throw up. The first few times I freaked out and went running for the bowl. Now I know that he's just like me and needs to eat immediately upon waking or else he gets nauseous (although, I had to have 2 barf-filled pregnancies to get to that point..he's a prodigy).
Theo's packing on the pounds!
ReplyDeleteLOL at eating three avocados at dinner. I'm always amazed at how much food small children are able to pack into their stomachs. When my mom was a year old or so, her aunt absentmindedly fed her *a whole can of peaches*. Apparently she was filled up through the esophagus. At last she literally couldn't hold them in...
TMI, I know...
What cute jammies on Theo...I just like how real you are about it all :)
ReplyDeleteYes, yup and definitely me too. Being generally laid back with sickness complaints to a fault catches up to me every once in a while and I also flip out about random things and stay up all night worrying that they won't survive til morning because they said their arm hurt somewhere and they were really going paralyzed and I missed the early warning signs.... and I should probably take them to the ER right now just in case they really were about to maybe lose the limb. But oh when they wake up not being able to sleep with that obvious ear infection and hacking cough I tell them it will just go away soon enough, load up the children's tylenol and send them back off to bed. Like I'd haul the crew to a peds visit for THAT?! Ha. See, you're waaaay more reasonable than I am!
ReplyDeleteAlso, the bucket planning, I'm impressed!
Seriously, today was a long day and catching up on your blog while eating chocolate is the highlight of my night.
ReplyDeleteSorry about the crappy on call stuff. And it is strange that they call it "on call" and not "gone forever" or "the suckiest shift ever" instead.
PS Glad Julia is OK!
Residency IS worth it! Not sure if your DrH has to do a fellowship too, hopefully not, because the jury is still out on that one. Funny, do we all have orange puke bowls???
ReplyDeleteSomething about out of sorts kiddos at night make "mom diagnoses" seem completely legit.
ReplyDelete