Research problem: need to sleep

Remember the cold that Dh brought home with him?  Well, my tiny tot came down with it on Friday night.  By Saturday afternoon she was truly a snotty kid, and by Monday morning her cough was so bad I took her in to see the doctor.

(as an aside, do any of you find it difficult not to refer to pediatrician as the vet?  try as I might I can't stop automatically saying that I took Mads to the vet's...  so now I just call it the baby vet.)

Luckily Mads hasn't yet had a fever, so I was mostly just worried because she was wheezy and having to use some effort to breath a little more than usual.

Turns out that it is really common for babies to get bronchulitis, and she had only a mild case.  But the baby vet sent us home with albuterol and a vapor machine thing to give her 3-4 times a day.  She hates it by the way, it kind of smells funny and is weird.

Needless to say the last few days have been kind of hard.  But the nights even moreso.  Mads couldn't sleep for more than about 1.5 hours before waking herself up with a scary coughing fit or because her nose was so stuffed up she couldn't really breath right.  And even worse, from her perspective, her nose was so stuffed up that she couldn't suck her thumb.

I was exhausted by Monday morning after 3 nights of this.  It was like having a newborn again without the adrenaline rush to keep me going.  I was losing my mental abilities again -- for example I was at the pharmacy picking up her prescription and had to sign for it.  The form also required me to state the signer's relationship to the patient.  I had to read this aloud to myself three times before I could figure out that the answer was "mother". 

Anyway, back to the point of this post.

I had some mothering break-throughs yesterday. 

1) she screamed bloody murder the whole time, but it really did seem to help when I suctioned her nose.  So, I just got strong and held her head down tight and suctioned that nose out last night.  She forgave me and fell asleep on my shoulder within minutes of the horrible-scary-thing.

2) parenting has some serious similarities to my work, and as a consequence some of the same feelings of reward. 

Background:
Designing and running research projects means that I have to figure out the important parameters of a problem and then determine what data I need to test a hypothesis.  A sick baby is like a research problem.  After 3 nights I knew that I wanted her to be comfortable, but that my initial approach was way too labor intensive.  I was getting up and holding her for hours.  She was sleeping, but I was losing my mind and starting to get sick. 

Problem:
how to get her comfortable enough that she can sleep but that I can at least sort-of sleep

Solution:
car seat on the bed between dh and me. 

Materials and Methods:
Mads first went to sleep in her crib at 5:30pm last night.  This only worked for about 30 minutes, and she was up coughing.  After time in a steamy bathroom, lots of soothing, and other attempts at a longer-term solution (ranging from putting folded blankets under her crib mattress so she wouldn't be flat to starting to resign myself to having to hold her all night), we had the creative break-through. 

My child really doesn't like the car seat, so I was not sure how I was going to be able to get the vision to work out logistically, but after an hour or so (and lots of lullabies, hushing, and nursing) she zonked out in the car seat at 11:30pm last night.  I barely fit on the bed too, but I was laying down and could sort-of sleep.  Tiny tot coughed and shuffled and did all kinds of weird things that kept me from sleeping well, but she stayed asleep until about 5am when I fed her, and amazingly was able to put her right back in the car seat and to sleep.  And then she woke up again at 7am. 

Well, she didn't really wake up on her own.  She did a HUGE poopoo and Dh just had to get in her face and marvel at what she'd just done.  This of course woke her up, but that wasn't a big deal because it was 7am and not 5am!!! 

Goal accomplished.  She was comfortable enough to sleep and I was comfortable enough to sort-of sleep.  I am feeling very proud of myself today.  And you know what Tiny Tot is doing right now?

napping in her car seat in her crib.