Friday morning started like many others -- I congratulated myself for waking up before my Theo-brand alarm, only to hear him start to rouse before I'd even made it to the coffee pot. Still, complaining that he didn't give me any morning time to myself would be futile as well as ungrateful on my part, because the last few weeks he has been letting me have 8 hours of sleep in a row.
I grab formula for Theo, coffee for Daddy and we head to the couch. Theo pushed the bottle away with 3-4oz left in the bottom. This is all too normal for him; if nothing else, Spud has taught his miserly Daddy not to get upset over wasting powdered milk.
In a not-so-normal move, the moment I turned him around for a burp, he deposited all the formula and a few chunks of last night's dinner square in my lap.
"Huh," I said to him. I was too shocked to come up with anything else. But he's puked before, so following standard procedure I changed our clothes and took him downstairs to see if he was hungry.
All the parents out there with extensive puke-related experience are going to notice all the mistakes I made from this point on. Please just laugh at me amongst yourselves and resist the urge to tell me about my shortcomings in the comments, because I already feel like crap and have a ceiling-high pile of laundry here reminding me of my mistakes...
Suffice to say the rest of the day was a blur of puking, changing clothes and trying to get something to stay in his stomach. The craziest part was, he wasn't bothered at all by any of this. He would just puke, look at me, and grin from ear to ear, then go back to whatever he'd been interested in before. On the plus side, he was smart enough not to pick up stomach contents and use them as hair product.
After a couple more episodes of "Daddy didn't like that shirt anyway," Mommy brought home some pediatric kool-aid at lunchtime, which helped a lot. [NOTE: In an attempt to avoid one registered trademark, I just fell back on another. Duuuuuurrrrrr, screw it.]
The pedialyte and some rice cereal stayed down all of the afternoon, which calmed the little voice inside my head that was encouraging me to call the doctor before the clinic closed while also inspiring me to add a little bit of formula powder to the same formulation at dinnertime. Oops. Dinner and lunch go everywhere, and now the clinic is closed. No problem, we'll just put something back in his stomach, right?
So after yet another cleanup, I put him to bed with a few sips of pedialyte and a couple swallows of rice cereal. [Yeah, remember what I said above about realizing now that I was dumb? Feel free to laugh.]
I sent Ruth off to watch the season premiere of BSG with some friends, and sat down to calm my own stomach (When did I eat last? who knows) with a couple black bean tacos and some instant noodles.
...And 10 minutes after finishing, realized that those WEREN'T hunger pangs in my stomach. After doing my best imitation of Theo (except I did it over the toilet! yay me!), I was actually OVERJOYED. "Oh thank goodness this has probably just been a stomach bug!" Parent logic is like that. So I went to bed a little before 9, and thank goodness spud slept straight through, so neither of us woke up until after 8.
Theo woke up acting perfectly normal -- happy to see me, but STARVING. Still not noticing the pattern from yesterday, I gave him a full bottle. Then a half-hour later, as normal, I fed him some breakfast, sticking with the pedialyte and cereal.
This time, most of it ended up on my shirt, until I put him down in his crib to clean myself up, when he went Vesuvius all over his sheet and anything else within a couple feet. An archaeologist could have found everything he ate that morning, plus cereal from the night before.
Then the kid pretty much went catatonic, lethargic, staring-off-into-space. I called the clinic weekend number, confirmed that I'd been a dumb-ass and received their blessing to take spud to the ER, because the clinic can't do forced rehydration.
Luckily we're only about a 10 minute drive from the hospital. Even though the kid clearly wasn't acting like himself at this point, I was never really worried. I could tell he wasn't dangerously dehydrated, but I knew if we didn't get him looked at and get some expert input into my mistakes, he could get there.
The ER went as well as I could've possibly hoped. We'd brought homework and a computer and beverages, girding ourselves for the "hurry up and wait," but ended up being there less than 90 minutes, with no long waits to speak of. We gave him a couple oz of pedialyte in the waiting room when he got grumpy, which perked him up quite a bit.
He never did smile at the doctor or triage nurse, but I wouldn't have big grins for a lady shoving a glass tube into my rectum either. Just not my kink.
The Doc and nurses reassured us that we'd done the right thing, that dehydrated babies are a bad thing and we shouldn't hesitate to call or bring him back if he didn't seem to get better.
They also made me realize, without saying so directly, that what DIDN'T help the situation was Daddy's paranoia that the kid would somehow starve to death in a matter of hours without calories in his tummy. For almost 11 months my world had revolved around getting every possible calorie into this little person's mouth -- now I'm supposed to just STOP? Until I heard it from the doctor and read it in the instructions, it seemed like crazy talk.
Since he'd already kept 2-3 oz of pedialyte down for an hour, we were at least able to skip the "feed him with an eyedropper" stage. The rest of the afternoon was spent filling a bottle with 2 oz of pedialyte every 30 minutes and giving it to a hungry boy, who would spend the following 30 minutes crying and fussing because he was still hungry. NOT good for Daddy's psyche, but I administered plenty of hugs and didn't budge. Midway through the afternoon he grinned at me, back to his old self and started playing on his own like nothing had happened.
By bedtime we were able to give him just a little bit of very diluted formula, a process we repeated through the night. He's been getting me up a lot the last couple nights to put something in his empty stomach, but he's still not as hungry as normal (and I now know better than to push it).
If he's not back to normal by tomorrow, there will be a trip to the pediatrician, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Sigh. It's 11:30. I should eat some breakfast.
[UPDATE: At James's suggestion, I'm posting a photo. This one is from Saturday afternoon but it's still an accurate portrayal of our moods this morning.]
1 comment:
mercy.
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