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After all the craziness and stress of the week… I needed to post this.

Tonight, O and I read a book together after he was dressed in his pajamas. (He named every damn animal in this book he has, including an eagle.)

Since it was past his bedtime, when I shut off the light, he was content to just lay his head against my chest.

We rocked in the near-darkness for a few minutes, listening to the music of the local classical station.

And I realized they were playing Adagio for Strings.

The same Adagio for Strings which made me cry with longing when I was pregnant with him.

And all of a sudden I was crying. Again.

This time, it was in happiness.

Joy.

Humility.

Thank you, universe.

Please send your love to Cece today, who over the weekend suffered a parent’s worst nightmare.

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(My first foray into Perfect Moment Monday.)

First night of standard time. It’s dark outside. Our kitchen is warm with light and dinner cooking.

O and I are playing “Ring Around the Rosie.” When it comes to the part where we all fall down, I sit down on the floor, and he runs over to me, throws his arms around me, and we fall down together, giggling.

He stands, up, tugs at my hands, and says “UP!”

And we play it again.

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It’s 3am, and I hear him on the monitor. He’s in light pajamas, and I’ve turned the overnight heat down in the house. As soon as I hear him say “hot” (yeah, we’re working on cold) I wonder if he’s cold.

He finally calls out, questioningly – “Mommy?”

So I go into his room.

His hands and feet are cold. I put on a pair of socks and gather a couple of blankets. We rock, him cradled to my chest, listening to the soft classical music from his clock radio, his shampoo sweet against my cheek.

He resists when I put him back into his crib. “Hot.”

So I pick him back up, and he clings to me, his arms around me neck. We rock for another 5 minutes, and his breathing slows. I know he’s almost asleep, so I put him in his crib. He looks up at me, sleepily, and smiles.

Then rolls over under the blankets and closes his eyes.

I am so lucky to be his mom.

Because I am almost GIDDY with happiness right now?

I needed to share.

My friend S emailed us this morning and said that this week, at the almost halfway point through her 12 week chemo treatment period…

… her oncologist is seeing “significant response” to her treatment.

Her white blood count is normal.

Her underarm lymph nodes have shrunk from 3cm to the size of a pea.

The large tumor in her breast has shrunk “significantly” and the smaller one (which was 1cm) is no longer detectable by physical examination.

Her oncologist believes that the lesions on her liver and accompanying lymph nodes will have responded accordingly.

It’s the BEST. NEWS. EVER.

Since she’s seeing results from the current treatment, her oncologist wants her to stay the course and continue down the path they’re going. In a few weeks they might add another drug into her chemo cocktail which has been known to prolong the time between recurrence.

If I could do backflips, it’s what I’d be doing right now. Even as tired as I am.

BEST. NEWS. EVER.

(And. Please, PLEASE, keep her in your thoughts and prayers.)

I KNEW something wasn’t right.

I just didn’t know what.

O hasn’t been himself for a while. At least a couple of weeks, I thought. Not sleeping. Not eating. Et cetera.

So when daycare called me yesterday to tell me that he was clingy and tired and fussy and had ANOTHER low grade fever… I decided to call his pediatrician.

And I felt really stupid about it. Because he’s had a low grade fever once a week or so. For what I thought was the past three weeks.

But aside from that? He hasn’t been acting SICK.

Just not HIMSELF.

And I didn’t want to be THAT mom – who brings her kid in with a cold and asks for antibiotics.

But it’s been long enough, and I didn’t think it could HURT.

So I called when he was taking his nap. And they told me to come in, just to be sure.

And he ate snacks and said “Hi!” multiple times to the Nurse Practicioner so that she would let him look at her computer.

And she didn’t hear anything in his lungs but sent us for an x-ray, just in case. Because they noted that he had a cough when he went to his 18 month well-baby appointment about a month ago. And it hadn’t really gone away since.

O ran around the waiting room for the x-ray like a kid possessed. He seemed completely over whatever it was that had bothered him that morning. And I felt so stupid for even being there – he was clearly fine.

Except he’s not.

He actually has pneumonia. In his upper right lobe.

From the quick googling I did, every sign seems to point to walking pneumonia, though it’s rare in toddlers. Maybe it’s viral.

But they gave us antibiotics for him.

And now we have a REASON for the night wakings. For the lack of eating. I KNEW something was off with him – I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

So now we know. And he’s on antibiotics. So hopefully, in a few days, he’ll be back to himself again.

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I love my son.

More than anything.

But I HATE his sleeping habits.

I often wonder if my nap ignorance when he was an infant is the cause of his sleep issues.

Because I’ve said it before. He really uses ANY excuse not to sleep.

And his sleep deprivation begets LESS sleep.

I wish I knew how to reverse it. Because for the past two weeks, he has been up EVERY NIGHT. For at least a half hour, more often an hour.

I wait him out, more often than not – give him 30-45 minutes to see if he’ll put himself back to sleep before I get up and try and fix it for him.

The one thing that has always stuck with me about sleep training was this – in order to solve sleep issues, you have to find the root cause of the sleep issues.

For example. If your kid is hungry, you can’t just expect him to sleep through the night without changing the way you feed him.

So J and I have been trying to find the root cause of the trouble.

And damned if we can’t figure it out.

There’s the cold, yes. He’s had a runny nose now for the past two weeks. And now a cough from the congestion.

Then there’s the lack of eating. With the exception of Sunday night, where he ate a hot dog AND a huge bowl of pasta about 15 minutes after a snack of salsa and chips and then humus and crackers (kid LOVES dip. Seriously, who knew?), he’s eaten about a third of what he usually eats. Every day.

In fact, yesterday he came home with almost all of his food we packed for him at daycare. And then didn’t eat dinner either.

So J and I thought maybe that his mouth was hurting from all the teeth he’s getting. His top molars, though they’ve poked through the gums, are still mostly gum. And whenever we look, we can tell that the gums around each molar are red and swollen.

But tyl.enol doesn’t do much, not that we’ve noticed, anyway. And we can’t give him motrin unless he actually EATS, because it makes him throw up.

So the poor kid has a LOT going on right now.

And truthfully, I’m more worried about HIM than I am pissed off about the sleep deprivation for myself.

There’s something just a little WRONG with him, something I can’t quite figure out. And he’s not vocal enough yet to tell me.

The only thing we figure we can do is ride it out.

Offer him a LOT of different foods in the hopes that he will find something he’s happy to eat.

Put him to bed earlier so he can catch up a little on his missing sleep.

And hope that this is a phase and will pass. Because, you know, they usually do.

I just never expected that more than a year and a half after bringing him home, we’d be as sleep deprived as we all are.

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*Thanks all for the suggestions and comments thus far. I also thought about his ears, but O has working tubes in both of his ears, and if/when he has an infection (he’s had two since the tubes last February), he gets a lot of drainage. So far his ears look fine.

Knock on wood, of course. I won’t be surprised if by the end of the week he DOES get an ear infection as well…