Safe With Me...

As a Mommy, there is nothing in the world worse than seeing your child sick. When Lexi looks up at me with those sad little eyes and say things like, "I don't feel good. Make my cough go away." it just makes a my heart shatter into a million pieces. It's true, no one wants to see their child in pain, and we'd do anything on earth to avoid it if we could.
But there is also a secret part of the sick child scenario...the part that most mom's don't admit to. It's that first sneeze, or elevated temp that makes us immediately think, "Oh crud, there goes my week!" No, it's not right or even kind, but it's fact - we expect our children to fit into our lives, and when they throw a monkey wrench into the plans, some of us (me) have a hard time dealing with that.
Then, to top it all off, they tend to sleep more during the day then at night, so we now have to do everything on little to no sleep. What time did I give her that Tylenol? Is it time for her Flovent yet...or did I already give it to her?? Which homeopathic remedy works best for a cough with a fever, and do I have that one, and if so how many, and how often do I give it, and oh yea, remember not to let her eat or drink 15 minutes before or after...argh!! It can make a mommy crazy - and these are not things that you want to make mistakes on!
This is the situation I have found myself in this week. After just starting to get caught up at work, Lexi came down with one heck of a virus that has her running a pretty high fever, along with a very nasty and unreleting cough. She's miserable because she doesn't feel good, and I'm miserable because my baby is sick, and the rest of my life is now falling by the wayside...again. Last night was a particularly tough night. She had been waking up about every 5-30 minutes with one problem or another. Daddy just won't do at night, so I had made about my thousanth trip to her bed and back. I climbed back into my bed and rolled over, hoping to get a few good snores in before the next call. Suddenly I heard a noise coming through the monitor that was just...not right. "Chirp chirp chirp..." I glanced over and the lights that indicate the monitor is picking up sound were not reacting. I propped myself up on the pillows to listen harder to what that sound could be. Just then Ahren sat straight up in bed and smacked me across the face.
Me - "Ah! Why did you hit me??"
Ahren - "Huh? Oh...sorry."
Apparently I somehow gave him the sudden impression that I was falling out of bed, and in his attempt to save me, he almost gave me a bloody nose. Since he was awake (or so I thought) I told him about the odd chirping sound coming from the monitor. Now, I watch WAY too much "Ghost Hunters" so this kind of thing obviously has me thinking that the ghost of the previous owner of our house was trying to talk to me through Lexi's monitor. I insisted that he listen to it with me, because I was too scared to hear it alone. I brought the monitor over toward his pillow and we both just listened (with me giving him an occasional poke to ensure he wasn't falling back to sleep). As the sound came in clearer we realized that we were listening to some poor southern fellow singing about his latest lady who done him wrong. Yup, it appears as though our monitor is picking up a country music station... Now reletively confident that the prior owner would not be communicating as a male country music singer, I simply chose to turn down the monitor so I wouldn't have to hear it.
As I snuggled back into bed I told Ahren that I felt silly, but I was still a little creeped out by the monitor issue - that and being smacked across the face out of the blue. As he pulled me in close to make me feel secure he said, "Don't worry honey...you're safe with me. Sort of..." And with that, he drifted back to sleep...and just as I started to dose off as well, I was beckoned back into my baby's room for another nose wipe.