Thursday, November 19, 2009

My baby is trying to kill me.

While we're so lucky that no one in our house has been felled by any type of flu so far, Ben has had a cold for what seems like forever. It's gotten worse in the past few days. My hopes were lifted after two pretty good nights of sleep on Friday and Saturday, but the past 4 nights have been just horrific. The little guy is so congested - our nights have been spent in a semi awake haze of crying and coughing. He can barely nurse because he can't breathe through his nose and every morning his little nose is crusted over. My baby is not a great sleeper to begin with. We've been letting him cry himself back to sleep for 2 months now and, even before the cold got bad, he was still waking up quite often during the night. When we started letting the Ladybug cry when she was a baby she caught on right away, and within a couple of weeks she was sleeping through the night. Ben is clearly more stubborn that his sister - no amount of letting him cry (which, by the way, KILLS me but I KNOW he does not need to be fed every 2 to 3 hours) has convinced him to just give in, roll over and go back to sleep when he wakes up. And now with the cold I feel even more guilty letting him cry, so I've been going in to him more often. So not only am I'm trying to get by with about 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night, but once this cold is over (soon please!) we'll be back to square one with him on the sleep issues. BUT, I am grateful that he just has a cold. No fever and he's still happy and smiling when he gets up in the morning. The caregivers at his daycare tell me his is just as happy and easy as ever.

I know that I am lucky, lucky, lucky in the grand scheme. But is a little more sleep too much to ask? Good thing he's so cute... if I do say so myself. ;)
Since I'm such a shitty blogger I'll share a little cuteness to show you how the little guy is growing.













4 comments:

Lorraine said...

Awww, he looks so adorable and harmless, and yet I KNOW the torture of those sleepless nights. When you're sleep deprived it's even harder to come up with new ways of trying to solve the problems, so I'll just say that a warm mist humidifier might help, and maybe a white noise thingamajig?

At least he's building up his immunity at a nice young age...

Unknown said...

Ben is so cute! What a great smile.

I went through the sleepless thing with our youngest son. He was simply wired differently from our daughter, who could sleep through the night at a very early age. Kevin OTOH was extremely sensitive to sounds, did not like being placed in his crib, yadda yadda. My sleep deficit was exacerbated by the stress I felt when I tried to ignore his crying; it was torture! I too returned to fulltime work, so the lack of sleep plus the job pretty much made me brain-dead.

Keep reminding yourself that change is constant and inevitable. You will not always have a baby boy who cries and is so restless. One day/night at a time. I know how hard it is.

Anonymous said...

Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!

Lollipop Goldstein said...

Sleep is not too much to ask for :-) I'm so sorry he's sick. I hope he gets better soon so you can get back to bed. The sleeplessness is torture.