fever

We had a long sleepless night. Eddie woke up at 11:30 p.m. after having been put down at 8 and I went to feed him like always. I noticed he seemed unusually hot, but thought maybe it was just the temperature in his room and turned the fan on. He also seemed a bit restless on the boob, sort of whimpering. After feeding, although he seemed tired, he couldn't fall back asleep. I let him work through it for about 45 minutes because he wasn't crying - he was just sort of talking and yelling. Shockingly Daddy Eddie was sleeping right through it. But around 1 a.m. I woke big Eddie up to have him feel the baby and see if my assumptions of a fever were right. We fumbled through the medical kit that we have barely even touched beyond the nasal aspirator to find the thermometer and contemplated, do we do it rectally? Our squirmy guy and a thermometer up the butt isn't something I really want to embark upon. So I put the standard one beneath the armpit and it quickly shot up to 101. Then we busted open the temporal thermometer and that one read 100.7. Note to new/soon to be parents: get 2 thermometers; in the middle of the night you will be questioning whether they are working properly and it helps to have a second verification. So we tried some cold compresses and a small dose of infant Tylenol (another note: yes, buy this stuff and have it on hand because you never know when a fever will come in the middle of the night and you won't want to have to run to the store.). And then I just breastfed him almost non-stop between the hours 2 - 5 a.m. He would fall asleep in my arms but then the minute I would go to put him in his crib he would wake up. So then I devised a method where I would lay him in his crib and lay next to him on the floor and wait until he was truly asleep and not struggling anymore and then crawled out of the room. It sucked. My guy just seemed so uncomfortable and so tired yet unable to sleep. At 5 a.m. Daddy Eddie brought him downstairs and gave him a lukewarm bath. Then we put him back to bed and once again, he only slept for 30 minutes or so. He was in a better mood around 8 a.m. and so we fed him his Cheerios and banana and he played for awhile. Now, back in bed...but he just woke up after only having slept 30 minutes. My poor guy!