Midnight Tea-time For Kaiden

It's been an interesting week. For some reason or another, Kaiden actually slept through the night without waking up for midnight tea...Once.

Yes, it was apparently an isolated incident as the very next night, he was up at his usual 11:30p.m. tea-time for teddy grahams & milk, a shot of his reflux medication and a bit of Tylenol.

As it turns out, apparently our neighbor leaves for work at about that time each week-night. I still am not sure if that is the culprit here, though.

I had thought that maybe this night-waking might be from his reflux because as of late he has taken to making what we affectionately call, "Demon baby noises" which are really grunting and strange guttural noises.

He used to do this in the hospital when he was first born, and later once we got him home, he seemed to do it all through-out the night.

His pediatrician added a medication to his existing reflux regiment and the grunting stopped and he started sleeping peacefully.

Of course, once the little gremlin noises started up again, I immediately thought that it might be his reflux rearing its ugly head. He had also started spitting up again which is very unlike an 18 month old.

Poor little dear, he even knows to ask for his "Med-son" as he calls it. It seems to be helping a tiny bit, but he still isn't eating well, and the grunting continues.

Another lovely part of the reflux diagnosis is that the medication makes him constipated. I have gotten to the point when I cannot tell if he is grunting and straining over his tummy hurting from the reflux, or if it is because he has to go potty.

I have tried giving him basically mild and light foods to try and ease something into his tummy so that he won't be hungry, but he always seems to turn his head the other way.

He would have normally just thrown his food, but I had to stop feeding the babies their meals in the feeding chairs because once Kai started throwing his food, the others would join right in!

We now feed them from the table as if the plate is ours and they are getting some sort of a treat from it. Oddly enough, this is working and the babies are actually getting more food this way.

I just hope that this phase ends soon so that they don't grow up with the table manners of Helen Keller!

Kaiden is already a light-weight for his age and height, so I am worried about him losing weight over all of this! He will drink a little milk and have a few teddy grahams every now and then.

Please don't think of me as a horrid Mum because I am letting him eat whatever he will no matter what the food happens to be. It's just that I would rather him have something in his tummy than he cry over it being empty!

The last few nights have been rather rough because he appears very constipated, yet his glycerin drops aren't helping him go potty any. One night, I even tried double dosing on them just to make sure that it got where it was supposed to be going!

I feel so awful over the whole thing. The poor dear can't eat over his throat burning from the reflux and when he has to out of sheer hunger, his tummy hurts because he cannot go potty.

I have been putting off giving him prune juice, but it looks like I am going to have to go that route soon if things do not get any better.

Last night, in order to get him to stay down in his own bed, we hauled the laptop upstairs to his bedroom and ran the cord to the plug in the hallway for him so that he could go to sleep while watching his favorite thing- the fishy screen saver that changes fish randomly as well as the light show.

Oddly enough, the fishies kept him distracted enough to get him to sleep for the most part all night (not counting tea-time at nearly midnight!)

I also discovered another reason for his crying and night-waking...He is cutting the last two teeth on the bottom at the same time.

I was nice and rubbed the points all the way through for him so that it won't bother him as much anymore. Now if I can only get his tummy coordinated, we will be in business!

Teething Troubles

It's very quiet right now, considering it's about four in the afternoon. As of late it's been very noisy for some reason or another. My trio are all cutting molars and various other teeth in odd places.

This means that they are teething. Teething means that ANY object that can fit in their mouth must be BITTEN and often! This process has involved chewing on such things as a tiny moose figurine (sorry Tyrone) that apparently is best chewed upon if you insert the antlers into your very wide open mouth and twist it a bit to where you can get those antlers in between the gaps in your teeth so that the missing ones can be enticed to break the skin.

Unfortunately for the moose, that pesky tooth has yet to break the skin yet. Sadly for my teething toddler, that moose's antlers just BARELY fit into his mouth so he has to open super wide to even be able to have the chance to maneuver it into his mouth. The laws of physics just are NOT in either party's favor here.

Kai has quickly discovered that if he isn't careful, those antlers will get stuck in your mouth (keeping it forcibly open) and just will not come out unless a parental unit takes pity in his plight (which often is very hard to do speedily as we are much to busy trying not to laugh at his predicament!)

Then there is the strange case of dental imprints popping up in places they shouldn't be. Poor Vivie has quite a collection running up and down her tiny, apparently very tasty, little baby girl arm. Kai has them on his bicep and even running down one leg. Oddly enough, Kian isn't sporting but a few bruises. I can only guess that it is Kian who has been leaving his dental imprints emblazoned on his siblings for all to see.

I really am at my wit's end with the biting business. It all happens so very quickly so I rarely can catch the actual act occurring. I know that if someone is crying, then someone usually was up to no good. However, in my house, It's the person who is wailing that gets the soothing mommy attention and not the one who may have caused them to cry.

I know that once they are old enough to really understand what they are doing that I will have to really crack down on this behavior. For right now, all I can really do is tell the general onlooking siblings that biting is bad and a no-no and hope that the offender really figures out that they are the one who is in trouble.

I have to take some reassurance in the idea that at least I am not giving them my undivided attention over the situation in that I must comfort the baby who is crying over being most recently mauled. I can only hope that this works out in the end. Either that, or those teeth will hopefully finally come in and the teething/biting urge will fade away along with it.

I am trying to hang in there and be a sweet and nice and loving mom, but it the power's that be are making it so very difficult. None of the babies seem to sleep entirely through the night. Thankfully, they rotate waking up which makes it a tad bit easier to soothe that baby back to sleep. The bad part is, that once I get one back into their beds, another one starts to squirm and cry and needs to be soothed.

This means that usually I don't get much in the way of sleep at night. I try and nap when the babies do so that I am at least tolerable to be around, but as of late that is becoming less possible. Today, they actually tag-teamed crying through-out nap time. They have been doing the same thing for most of the day. In fact, it's odd that it was quiet long enough for me to write this! Those teeth HAVE to come in sometime!

Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining. I know that it will be over in a heartbeat. I even am trying to find ways to find the humor in all of this. Maybe it's some sort of honor to get to sport your sibling's dental imprints on your arm...a sort of baby right of passage maybe? I remember when my baby sister proudly left her dental imprint on my arm. She was always so proud of herself. I must have had that bruise for at least two weeks.

Ah well, it's almost dinner time for babies at my house. I have until "The Backyardigans" ends to have dinner ready and avoid the fussies! Maybe I can find something for them to chew on that is SUPPOSED to actually go in their mouths this time!!!!