Around 2 a.m. Shep woke up crying very loudly, practically screaming. Lucinda and I have been past the let-him-cry-it-out gauntlet for quite a while now, so at first we took that approach, but at maybe the twenty minute mark we decided direct intervention would be appropriate. Thus began a series of attempts to get him back to sleep including pacing while carrying him, rocking him in the glider, lying him in our bed with us, offering him a bottle of milk, letting him cry it out more, and finally dosing him with Infant Motrin, at which point he finally fell asleep, a little after 3:45 a.m.
Now it may occur to you (and believe me, it has definitely occurred to Lucinda and me) that a much more prudent course would have been to give Shep some Infant Motrin at 2:01 a.m. and get everyone the hell back to sleep as soon as possible. But that’s really a hindsight-driven proclamation. On the one hand it presupposes that when the baby started screaming it was instantly recognizable as cries of pain. Not so. He mostly sounded pissed off, which meant the first cribside visitation involved checking to make sure his diaper hadn’t overflowed and left him soaked, gross-smelling, cold and cranky. (It hadn’t.) The next operating theory was just that he was pissed off to be awake – Shep’s never been the best sleeper, and running the aforementioned cry-it-out gauntlet was hard on everyone, and even now on the other side of it he has his inexplicable moments. It certainly seemed a reasonable possibility at the time. And even now, a couple of days later, I’m not 100% sure if he really was in pain and the Motrin really is what got him to a place where he could settle down, or if he was just so exhausted as 4 a.m. came into view that he would have fallen asleep then under any circumstances. This is a sub-corollary of “you always find what you’re looking for the last place you look”. Of course you do; once it’s found you stop looking. Motrin was the last thing we tried, but that might be because it worked or might be because it was the last thing we tried before there was no reason to try any more.
But STILL (I hear you say) why not give him the Motrin first, and then if it hadn’t worked and he had just needed an hour and forty-five minutes of attention and/or wearing himself out, you would have lost nothing. There’s a reasonableness to that, but both Lucinda and I are reluctant to make the medicine cabinet our go-to. We share a vague sense that we might be doing the baby a disservice if we did that. Not that he’s going to become addicted to baby meds, a shivering junkie looking for just a little fix of St. Joseph’s chewable aspirin, but … well, yeah, maybe something like that, psychologically if not physically. We don’t stint on giving him fever-reducers and painkillers when we know for a fact he has an active ear infection, but when we have no reason to believe he’s sick, we don’t want to give him ibuprofen just to shut him up. That seems like a bad association to form in his tiny young mind, and it seems like lazy parenting. It just boils down to saving the medicine as a last resort feeling on a gut level like the right thing to do, no matter how painful a ruined night’s sleep may be.
And this is not a double standard, for whatever that’s worth. I’ve had a diffident relationship with painkillers most of my life. I used to get some wicked headaches as a kid, and often taking an aspirin wouldn’t help, which as an adult I can look back on and realize probably means I needed stronger (possibly prescription) medicine but at the time just made me feel like popping pills was pointless (and I had a sensitive gag reflex and hated swallowing pills anyway). So to this day, despite the fact that I believe wholeheartedly in medical science and the good it can do, in this one particular area I’m always stupidly skeptical. (Twenty minutes for an analgesic to kick in? In twenty minutes my headache might go away ON ITS OWN.) (Yes my headaches are volitional, anthropomorphized things.) I guess I’m passing this on to my son in a way, at least until he’s old enough to decide for himself when to take over-the-counter meds and when not to.
My self-medicating option of choice, by the by, is food. I tend to eat more when I’m sick, swearing by the old “feed a cold” axiom and taking it undoubtedly way too far. I just got over a cold last week, and by then it was basically time to start getting ready for Thanksgiving, Christmas and everything in between. Not to mention that the whole house-buying process we are currently in the middle of is stressful and begs for its own gustatory amelioration. I don’t think the house-buying is going badly, and I don’t really believe that anything untoward is going to happen between now and when it’s finally a done deal, so I’m not feeling stressed in the sense of being scared, upset, angry, or any of those emotionally negative states. But the process involves more things to do each day than the norm, and often more things than I feel like I have the energy for, plus it’s often unpredictable which means I can’t do enough to prepare for the excess demands on my time because I don’t see them coming. That is stressful, and that in turn makes me want to stuff my gullet. All. The. Time. I suppose the bright side really is that all these things are perfect storming along all at once. When the holidays are over and it’s time to make New Year’s Resolutions we’ll be well-settled into our new house and I’ll have no distractions from reining in my gluttony. But for the next six weeks I will be fattening up like a goose. (Which, from my perspective, barely constitutes a complaint at all.)
That whole "how do we get the kid to sleep/kid goes to sleep/why didn't we do that first" and reluctance to give Motrin? Yeah, me and the missus are so very well acquainted with all of that, and our Shep is (okay, was) a good sleeper.
ReplyDeleteIf you aren't second-guessing yourself at three in the morning, by jiminy, you aren't a parent!