My Goal this Month in Learning 2 Love & Be Connected:

The time has flown by and again, just like in April, I was unable to update my blog weekly. I had lofty goals for “Learning to Love” in May but the month turned into a goal of “just get our baby well”….

My Experience this Month:

It wasn’t until I had a baby that I came to understand my expanded capacity to love. From the moment I saw the positive pregnancy test to the first ultrasound, felt her first movement and saw her beautiful eyes I was filled with a love that I didn’t know was possible. And I also learned how quickly your life can be totally consumed by the well being of your baby. The entire journey has opened up my heart and mind in ways that I never knew was possible.

Other than Kaylee needing medication to control her acid reflux and projectile vomiting as a newborn, she has not been a baby prone to many illnesses that required antibiotics – we were pretty lucky. Then came the month of May. Kaylee had an on-going fever with a persistent cough and she just wasn’t herself. The first visit to the DR was unsettling because they thought it was just a virus going around. But just 3 days later we were back at the DR with a high fever (104) and now she had bronchitis and an ear infection. Double whammy! 1^st round of antibiotics and a week and half of her not breathing well, not eating well and not sleeping unless she slept with Mommy – needless to say – none of us got much sleep. My husband, Tim, and I were taking days off work to stay with her on the high fever days and then after work tried our best to be patient through her fussiness. The days were long and the nights even longer.

After a week of meds, she was feeling better and back on the road to being herself again, hooray. Then just 2 weeks later, she was back to having a fever for a couple days and one night it was 105.1! That was scary for us since she had never been a high fever baby. We called the on call DR and after some Advil we were off to the bathroom for a cool bath – luckily her fever came down quickly. We were back at the DR the next day. They tested her for everything and nothing came up so they sent a urine sample to the lab just to be safe. (A urine test that I had been asking for a couple times at the DR since the odor was so bad for several weeks (even during her battle with bronchitis). Come to find out she had Pseudomonas – a very stubborn bacterial infection in her urine. My Dad contracted this same bacteria during his battle with ALS so I was very familiar with the dangers and challenges in fighting it off.

Chances are if you are a parent in this day and age, as soon your child’s DR tells you something like this, you go on the internet for more answers. I have concluded that the internet is a dangerous place for a worrisome Mom. Everything I was reading just made me worry about her more. Once again, we were back to antibiotics, fevers, not eating, diarrhea, not sleeping – the whole enchilada. We barely had time to recuperate from her last infection and here we were again.

And let me just say…the strain on your job performance and relationship with your spouse during something like this is so unexpected and requires true commitment. When you are getting 3 to 4 hours of sleep at best in 1 hour increments, trying to calm a screaming toddler, trying to function at work and still get all the other “crap” done around the house – losing your sanity surely comes to mind. If you didn’t have any issues with your spouse before…you certainly will when going through something like this. But somehow we made it through and after 10 days of antibiotic hell, she was given the clear – no more infection. Hooray! And after a week of going back to our sleep training techniques – we were finally on the road to getting 6 to 7 hours of sleep again. Hooray!

Our lives for the better part of 6 weeks was all consumed by nurturing Kaylee and trying our best to help her feel better as quickly as possible. It is a terrible feeling to witness your child going through an illness and there is very little you can do to help her besides holding her while she cries, watching Cinderella and Tangled all night long, letting her eat as many crackers as she wants since she wouldn’t eat anything else, telling her the medicine will help it not hurt, kicking  your husband to the couch since she wants to sleep with Mommy and there just isn’t enough room for a stretched out toddler and Daddy in the same bed…I really thought to myself…GEESH…I totally owe my Mother BIG TIME if this is what she put up with when I was a baby. (Yes, Mom…I finally get it).

Although, my goals for the month will have to wait for June…I still had moments where I practiced “love, love, love” – during the wee hours of the morning when I thought Kaylee would never fall asleep and my patience was running thin, I would take a deep breath and remind myself “I am so blessed”, “I love having this time with her to be a Mom and just love her”, “I will eventually get some sleep” and “this too shall pass” – having these thoughts playing in my mind truly helped me get through those long nights and tired days. And even as tired as I was, when she would finally fall asleep, I would still spend precious sleeping time staring at her precious restful face, watching her breath and thinking how lucky I am to be her Mommy!

So, the month of May is behind us and we venture on with a few more notches on our “being parents bedpost” and with a new found gratitude that all is well once again.

~ Hoping you find a way to stay connected ~

Love,

Victoria 🙂