About a month ago, I made plans to go see my friend Serenity by myself at the end of September, leaving The Husband and Baby B alone for a weekend. I was a very nice wife and thought, “Well, I get my weekend alone, so why not let him have a weekend away too?” His beloved Dragon*Con was coming up and we hadn’t planned to go as a family this year because Baby B is at a difficult age for that sort of thing (a toddler running loose around among 30,000 convention-goers isn’t so ideal), so I suggested that maybe he go with his friends to that. He was, of course, happy to go along with the plan.
So his trip came up first, over Labor Day weekend…this weekend. He was leaving on Thursday morning and returning on Monday night, so I am solely in charge for four straight days. This is the first time either of us has been away from the family overnight since Baby B was born.
I knew there was trouble when I started getting a horrible sore throat on Wednesday morning…and then when Baby B started getting a runny nose on Wednesday evening. We woke up on Thursday and my sore throat was at its peak for most of the morning, but her runny nose seemed, well, if not better, then at least not worse, so she went to daycare. During the day on Thursday, my sore throat eventually subsided and gave way to the intense sinus pressure I get with colds.
I picked up Baby B after work and we had a nice evening together playing and getting some things done around the house despite neither of us feeling the greatest. Around bedtime, though, everything went downhill. My sinus pressure was at its peak, and I was miserable, yet had to get Baby B to bed by myself. I could tell she was starting to get a bit more congestion in her head and her chest herself, and she had a horrible cough that had her gagging at times. I gave her some honey for that, since I’ve read that studies show it’s just as effective for coughs in children as cough syrup, which shouldn’t be given to kids her age.
After a couple extra potty trips, I finally got her down around 8:45 p.m. She was still coughing, so I propped up some pillows and showed her how to sleep a little more upright so her coughing was better. My plan was to get a few necessary chores done around the house and then head to bed as soon as possible so I could rest up. That changed at 9 p.m. when I heard Baby B cough so much that she puked on herself and all over her bed.
Despite feeling awful myself, I kicked into gear (and thankfully my cold medicine also did shortly after), got Baby B cleaned up and calmed down (she caught some of it in her hand and she said it scared her), stripped the bed, got things put in the washing machine, and put new sheets and blankets on the bed. I had to convince her again it was time to go to bed and finally got her down again around 10 p.m. I did a few things on the computer and around the house, then got to bed around 11:30 p.m., reading a chapter in my book for about half an hour before turning off the light at midnight.
Baby B woke me up around 12:15 a.m. and 12:30 a.m., and I soon decided it was going to make more sense for me to sleep in there with her so I didn’t have to get up and walk across the length of the house every time she cried out. And by sleep I mean “sleep,” as there was almost no sleep on my end and very little on hers. About every 20 or 30 minutes, she’d wake up crying for one reason or another…needing water, needing to go to the potty, asking for a hug, asking for medicine, too much coughing — you name it. Most heartbreaking was when she was wailing in the bathroom during a potty break and I asked why she was crying. She said, “I’m sad because my daddy left us!” Poor girl. We finally both dozed from about 3 a.m. until 5 a.m. but she started waking up every 15 minutes after that, including a stint of being completely awake and up around 6 a.m. Around 8 a.m., I convinced her to play with her Little People while I laid back down, though I didn’t really go back to sleep. We got up for the day around 9 a.m.
Needless to say, she didn’t go to daycare as planned, and I didn’t get the day to myself that I’d hoped for. I’d planned to run some errands and then go see a movie during the afternoon. Not the end of the world, of course, but it would’ve been nice to have that time. We got up and had breakfast and she seemed to be doing decent, so I decided to take a chance and take her out with me to the grocery store and for a few other errands I’d hoped to do today. She did great, thankfully, and now she’s resting a bit between lunch and naptime. Her cough seems to be gone, so hopefully there will be no more puking tonight.
Baby B misses her dad a LOT; it’s quite obvious. Thankfully the convention center is filled with free wireless connections, and his laptop has a webcam in it. We had a crappy webcam that we never really used, but I decided to go get a better one yesterday, and we’ve already had three video chats on Google Talk. Much better since Baby B can see The Husband (and hey, it’s free!) and he can see us too.
Here’s hoping that last night was the most difficult of all the nights I have alone with her and it’s smooth sailing from here on out.