On being awake, living with fluids, and putting the dog on meds

Jason and I had grand plans to go to bed early and actually get some sleep last night. First rule of parenting: change your expectations, or just don't have any.

Hannah went down to sleep easily, which is pretty normal. We were all settled in, it was probably a little after 10:00 when I finally turned off the TV and tried to sleep. It's hard to sleep over the sound of a dog vomiting next to your bed. Yep, Benson hacked up two piles of leftovers onto the carpet.

It smelled like sunflower seeds. I am going to attribute that to the entire pack of them that he pulled out of Jason's baseball bag and ate on the living room floor the night before. Plastic packaging and all.

Jason cleaned up the puke mounds, cussing.

Back to bed...for about 15 minutes.

Hannah coughs. And coughs. And coughs. She always coughs through the night in sequences of three. It was driving Jason mad. So, in my attempt to resolve the situation I crept into Hannah's room and tried to slip a pacifier into her mouth. It worked, until she heard the floor creak when I tiptoed out (there is only one place in the whole house where the floor creaks and it happens to be right at the base of her crib).

She started wailing.

I tried to console her, rocking her in her glider. She finally settled down, but unsettled when I put her back in bed. Jason gave it a shot. No luck. Finally, we went to the milk bottle solution. That did the trick. Back to bed. On my way back I stepped in the dog vomit wet spot.

Speaking of the dog, we were told by the vet yesterday that Benson is having an allergy problem. (We were also told that we could put him on Prozac if he didn't stop marking our carpet, which blew my mind.) This is the reason he has been scratching himself raw on his belly, licking his feet to a point of swelling, and messing with his ever-infected ears. He chose this moment in the middle of the night to have a scratch attack. Scratching, scratching, scratching, scratching, scratching...and so on. It was driving us nuts. We decided to give him Benadryl (our vet told us we could - apparently he is a big pill guy). Within ten minutes Benson was a limp pile of sleeping dog. Back to bed.

Maybe a couple of hours later, I awake to Benson standing up under the covers of our bed by my feet. I lifted the covers to scope the situation. A waft of sunflower seeds hit my nose. I put my hands down by his feet and felt around. Yep! Wet. But not vomit. Urine. Benson was so blitzed from the drugs he wet our bed.

It was 4:30 at this point. I woke Jason up so he could help me resolve the situation. In the process of taking the sheets off the bed I stepped in the vomit spot, no less than four times.

We got the laundry going and I went into the spare bedroom to sleep. Thirty minutes later, Hannah was up. Don't worry, she had peed her bed a little too. Apparently the midnight milk was too much for Pampers.

We got up and got into the bath tub. Water running, I set her in. She didn't even get all the way sitting before a tiny fountain of pee came out. Drain the tub. Rinse. Refill. We're having fun now. She wants to drink the bath water. We fight about it. I win, but she screams.

After the bath we head downstairs. Mama needs coffee. Hannah pounds on the sliding glass door. She loves to be outside. I grab my coffee and we head out. I get my feet caught in my pajama pants as I try to walk down the two concrete steps onto the patio. Coffee down my leg. I don't even care. I sit down and help Hannah down the stairs. She stubs her bare toe. Blood everywhere. I run inside quickly and get a wet paper towel to press on it. I come out and she's using her tiny toothpick finger to mess with a roly-poly that is crawling along the ground. It was adorable. I go to grab my phone to take a picture. Turn around to see her hand leave her mouth. Uh-huh. She ate it.

As I write this, she is laying in her crib, trying to nap and coughing in threes. Benson is sleeping under the covers in the spare bedroom, hopefully alive but not peeing. I am laying on my mattress, no sheets, in my coffee-stained pajama pants, thinking about what a shower might feel like and how I need to stop wondering why I am a little more anxiety-ridden than normal these days. I don't sleep and I spend most of my time bandaging, cleaning, sleeping in, or stepping on bodily fluids. It's so ridiculous, I laugh.

This is parenting.