Terror Comes to Tiny Town…

…in which I talk about my poor, poor little baby and his horrible, terrible, no good, very bad night.

So, Wednesday was not a good day for baby Ansel. He was dripping snot all day, didn’t sleep well the night before, and didn’t nap well all day. He was grumpy (which was reiterated by his “GRUMPY” onesie) and we were pretty sure that Wednesday night would not go very well either, but we had no idea how bad it could be.

…in which I talk about my poor, poor little baby and his horrible, terrible, no good, very bad night.

So, Wednesday was not a good day for baby Ansel. He was dripping snot all day, didn’t sleep well the night before, and didn’t nap well all day. He was grumpy (which was reiterated by his “GRUMPY” onesie) and we were pretty sure that Wednesday night would not go very well either, but we had no idea how bad it could be.

For those of you who have not met our Ansel, he is a super-champ. He’s very laid back, almost always cheerful, and just an all around happy baby. He hardly cries, and when he does, it takes almost nothing to soothe him again. Heather and I consider ourselves very lucky with him, and accept the fact that this may change as he gets older and are not taking his relaxed nature for granted. We appreciate every second of it.

My retelling of this may be a bit off, seeing as how I was pretty solidly asleep and I’m putting it together based on what I could discern from Heather. We struggled to get him to even go to sleep Wednesday night, and finally, with Heather sleeping on the floor in his room by his crib, he fall asleep. This was a short lived solace because after a short while, he all of a sudden awoke screaming, uncontrollably. I don’t know how long he screamed before I woke up in the next room, past a closed door, but I know Heather was crying trying to console him. After my head cleared and I realized this was no dream or hallucination, I got up to go check on them. When I found them, Ansel was in his crib screaming like his toes had been eaten in the middle of the night, and Heather was looking for something – anything – to soothe him. I rescued her and took him a way to try and calm him down myself.

Now, like I said, Ansel is usually pretty easy to calm back down. For the most part, if he’s crying, you can just pick him up, carry him around for a little bit and bounce him in your arms and he’ll eventually downgrade his crying to sniffles and rest his head on your shoulder. This was not the case! No amount of waking, carrying, or bouncing was going to stop his wails. He was crying so hard that his body was shuddering. I went to the kitchen to try to find a solution. My first thought was that his teeth were in serious pain. He’s been teething again, and I’ve heard tell that the further back the teeth are, the more they hurt when they come out. So I tried cold water and Tylenol. Neither of which helped, in fact, he almost just poured the Tylenol back out of his mouth with his relentless crying. So after what felt like an eternity, between Heather and I both trying to make him feel better, I decided I’d get him a cold teething ring and opened the refrigerator. As I reached in, he started to quiet down. In my half-asleep, completely frustrated, stupor, I had to stop and think about why the refrigerator was calming him down. Was it the cold? Was it the glow of American consumerism? Was it something in the refrigerator, specifically? It finally occurred to me that in an effort to keep the mood calming, neither Heather nor I had turned on any lights. To test this theory, I went in to the living room, flipped the lights on full blast and started poking all of Ansel’s music toys.

He immediately stopped crying and started showing interest in his toys so we sat down on the floor and played for a bit. Heather came in and kind of calmed herself down, as well. We sat there for a while before I admitted that I needed to go to bed or I’d be useless the next day at work. However, when I got to bed, I found that the two hours of sleep I’d already had, plus the excitement and fear from Ansel’s crying fit had worked me up too much to sleep, so I ended up just reading for another 45 minutes or so. Needless to say, I ended up snoozing my alarm far more than I should, and then dragging myself through the morning to the point that I was an hour late to work on Thursday.

Fortunately, Thursday was a much better day for Ansel, and Friday is shaping up to be better still. Whatever scared him so bad Wednesday night seems to have passed and he looks to be getting over his cold. Unfortunately, Heather and I both seem to be fighting off a little bit of a cold ourselves. What goes around comes around.

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