Mean Girls and Sleepless Nights

Last night was less than fun. I was up barfing at 11, got to sleep by around 11:30, only to be awoken by the alarm on my cell phone randomly going off at midnight. I woke up in sort of a panic and it took quite a while to get calmed down and back to sleep. A few hours later the kids started their shtick. Laylee was crying that her ears hurt so Dan carried her downstairs for some ear drops and a cough lozenge. He told her she could stay up until the lozenge dissolved.

I love the guy but he obviously doesn’t understand the ability of a determined 6-year-old to permanently preserve a candy in a dry spot in the side of her cheek if it means she can stay up all night watching Rick Steves and his glasses tour Europe.

I’m sure that the original manuscripts of the 4 gospels would be perfectly intact to this day if they’d been given to a child who was told, “Hold these in your mouth until they dissolve and then you need to go to bed.”

So Dan sat with Laylee while I laid in bed until 15 minutes later when Magoo woke up screaming that his throat hurt. I cuddled and calmed and shushed him and he continued to scream out and grab the side of his neck every few seconds.

“Is it your ear that hurts, buddy?”

“No. MY FROAT!!!!”

Now if it really was his throat, I’m not sure that ear-piercing screams were the best therapy for it but it was hard to convince him of that and so I brought him water to drink and held him while he screamed. Eventually I was moved to employ the Tylenol placebo. “If he is in pain, it might even help with that,” I told myself. If you give a kid medicine they’ll shut up and sleep, right? Or maybe they’ll just want some milk to go with it…

Of course as he swallowed it, he began to rage as though I’d poured acid down his throat. “It HURTS. OW! I WANT MY DAD!” he screamed. “Oh, for the love, you can have him,” I thought as I headed downstairs.

“Trade,” I said to Dan. “I’ve poisoned the boy with cherry-flavored-poisonous-pain-killing-death and he wants his dad.”

As Dan headed upstairs, I looked at Laylee’s airtight sealed cheek and smiled as sweetly as I could muster in the middle of the night and suggested, “Chew it and swallow it. You have 3 minutes.”

This morning we took the kids to the pediatrician and they’re both all swollen up with ear infections. Antibiotics all around! We stayed home together, laid around and watched the time pass. Tonight they are drugged and appear to be sleeping. Hooray for small miracles. I wonder how long after I go to bed they’ll decide they’re in agony again.

Over at Parenting today I’ve written about our kindergarten experiences with Mean Girls and exclusive cliques. Go on over and let me know, have you noticed these behaviors happening this young with your kids?