Tonight Aleck is two months old!! Craig and I have kept Aleck alive for a whole two months, a huge accomplishment if you know us at all. I turned to someone and remarked how I couldn’t believe it had been two months already. Her response to me was, “The longest two months of your life.” I couldn’t agree more. As much as it feels like time is flying, it also feels like its moving at a snails pace. On one hand I can’t believe its December already, I remember imaging this time back in October. But on the other hand, we won’t be done with casting until about the first or second week of January and we have at least 3 more weeks of trying to get that hip back in place. It’s not that either of these are such horrid experiences, its more that new parents have to work really hard to figure out what’s wrong with their baby; are they wet, did they poop, are they hungry, is it gas, are they overtired, uncomfortable, too warm, too cold. For us we get to add; is the splint on right, is it too tight, is the cast too tight, was this week a more serious move so is he more uncomfortable? It certainly makes the process of elimination much more difficult.
After my last entry on Friday I contacted our Pediatric Orthopedist again to insist that I go to Children’s to see if they could widen the hip splint to make Aleck more comfortable that way we don’t lose any valuable time getting that hip to lock in place, and so that tomorrow night we don’t have another awful night for him to get used to it again. The first time he got it he awoke every 30 minutes, not screaming, but fussing, and I was able to get him back to sleep by talking and shushing him for the most part. We were there for about an hour and a half widening the splint in various places, adding padding to make him more comfortable, and checking to make sure he had plenty of room for his tummy to expand with each poop and fart. Since he’s still such a little guy it makes a major difference when he’s bloated which might have added intensity to his screaming before each poop and fart, making him inconsolable.
I put the splint back on him before leaving the hospital and he seemed his usual self. He’s kind of fussy anyway, hey who wouldn’t be with all this crap going on, so I thought we were good. When he woke up screaming after his middle of the night feed we tried to console him, it had only been an hour and half since the feed so he couldn’t be hungry (before all of this began he was easily going 3 hours between feeds). In exhaustion and frustration we took the splint off again. He eventually fell asleep on Craig’s shoulder and was relatively calm and peaceful for the rest of the morning. I popped it back on at around noon and he was just miserable for the rest of the day. First he seemed fine, falling right into a nap in the middle of the day, but he woke up 4 times in an hour and a half. The funny thing was, I actually laid down as well. People keep telling me, “You go down when the baby goes down”, so I went down, but clearly it did me no good. I eventually gave up, it was feeding time again, and he seemed OK, just cranky. Then that night he became inconsolable again. Maybe he was just overtired, maybe it was his tummy, regardless we took the splint off again. We’re both just so sensitive to the fact that it could be causing him discomfort now that he’s growing pretty regularly that we have to add that to our process of elimination list almost every time.
The only way to get him to sleep was to put him in the swing. Or as many parent magazines and books call it, “The Neglect-o-matic”. He calmed down and fell asleep almost immediately. My sister was sweet enough to offer to stay up with him a bit to make sure he was really sleeping so Craig and I could get some sleep. I was getting myself ready for a full day of work the next day so I knew I had to get some sleep. Crawled into bed at 10:30 but it was useless. I laid there, listening to the sound of the swing, feeling this crazy nervous energy running through my body, the type that makes it impossible to get comfortable, to get settled. So many thoughts kept running through my head, thinking about everything that could be bothering him so much he has to be in a swing in order to calm down. Of couse in addition to everything I mentioned earlier I started thinking about ways it could be our fault that our little guy couldn’t get settled. He’s overtired, we don’t have him on a schedule, he’s in front of the television too much, we haven’t established a night time ritual yet, blah, blah, blah. Then I started to wonder if the swing was working so well, would it work too well. Would he not wake up to let us know its time for his next feed? So at 1AM I turned the swing off. At 1:30am he woke us up crying, and it was Craig’s turn for the feed. Then I lay there worrying that he wouldn’t want to go back to sleep afterwards, he’d been so upset that day. Craig crawled back at 2:30AM and I finally got some sleep until my alarm went off at 6am. Somehow I made it through all 4 hours of shooting, and I think it went really well. Of course I was in bed at 8:30pm last night 😉
Tomorrow is his 4th casting. I want to talk to them to make sure they don’t make it too tight. This one looks like its squeezing his upper thigh pretty hard, maybe another reason why he’s been so fussy all week long. I’m very nervous about getting him fitted for another hip splint. Will that mean another 3 days of acclimating to it? And what if they decide the one he has is just fine, will he really be comfortable in it? Why can’t these babies just talk already!?!