All Ears

We had the night from hell last night. Seriously. It was worse than any other night we've ever had with Nora, including the early newborn days.

We were essentially awake from 1 a.m. until 7 a.m. straight. We would get settled back into bed and maybe start drifting off to sleep and then she'd be screaming again. She was up every hour or less. And she was clearly tired--she wanted to sleep, we could tell--but she wouldn't last long before she'd be up again. I thought I was going to lose my mind. At 7:00, out of complete desperation, I gave up on trying to comfort her in her crib and brought her into bed with us, hoping that we'd all get at least a little bit of sleep. It was still hard to settle her, but eventually Nora did drift off and we all got a couple hours of sleep.

At 10:00, I woke up feeling like a zombie. I told Michael that I wanted to call the pediatrician, mostly because I just needed to hear "There's nothing you can do differently. It's just a stage" from a medical professional. When I called, I never expected to hear anything else besides that.

The nurse listened to me explain what Nora had been doing, and asked questions about her eating habits, congestion, etc. To my surprise, when I told her that Nora has had nasal congestion for about 9 or 10 days, she said that she wanted us to bring her in to check her ears. I suspected that her ears were probably fine, but we went into the doctor's office anyway.

And, well, I guess it was a day for surprises, because as it turns out, Nora does have an ear infection. And maybe it makes me a horrible mother, but I have never been so happy to hear a diagnosis. I was practically giddy, in fact. Of course, I do not want my baby to be sick, but OH MY GOSH, it's quite possible that an ear infection--a TREATABLE ear infection--is the cause of our sleep hell.

Because of Nora's young age and the fact that her sleep is so interrupted (seemingly by the ear infection), the doctor wanted to start her on antibiotics right away instead of waiting a day or two to see if the ear improved on its own. So now we have Amoxicillin for the next 10 days, with the expectation that we should see an improvement in Nora within 2-3 days or so.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE let this be our answer.

I asked the doctor if there is a chance that the sleep issues are a result of the four-month sleep regression, instead of the ear infection. She said that there's always a chance, but it would be pretty coincidental to have the sleep regression start at the same time as a cold + ear infection.

I am cautiously optimistic, but only time will tell.

In the meantime, we're trying to figure out how we're going to put Nora to bed tonight. Do we stick with the crib now that we moved her into it last night? Do we move her back into our room?

It's a good idea to let her sleep with her head higher than her feet, the doc said. For at least a couple of days, since her ear is likely painful. That's all well and good, of course, but now we're trying to figure this out, too.

Do we let her sleep in the bouncy seat IN the crib? If so, how are we going to strap her in while keeping her swaddled? To help her congestion, we tried propping up the mattress in the pack n play earlier this week, but Nora kept shimmying down to the bottom since she moves so much, so that wasn't very successful. We could try to put her to sleep flat, but we just did that for her nap and she woke up crying about 40 minutes into it, even though she was still clearly tired. After a couple of unsuccessful tries at getting her settled again, I decided to prop her up in her boppy and thanks to that, she's been sleeping soundly for more than another hour now. And while that's an OK daytime solution while I'm checking on her often, we don't feel comfortable doing that at night.

Oy. My head is going to explode. :)

Here's to hoping that Nora feels better very soon... and that we all sleep better soon, too!