Last night may have been one of the worst nights we’ve had since Cate was a newborn. Her asthma flared up yesterday, which I was kind of expecting as her cold was getting worse. I’d started her on her steroid inhaler on Monday, when she first started showing signs of getting sick – the idea is that it’s supposed to help with the swelling in her airways so she won’t have an asthma attack. In my experience, though? It never really seems to work at preventing squat.

So when she started wheezing yesterday, we added on her albuterol inhaler. That plus some Motrin seemed to help… until around 6:00 last night. Then she just started wailing and wouldn’t stop. It was the kind of crying that obviously wasn’t a tantrum or basic toddler frustration; this was the “I’m miserable and you aren’t fixing it” crying.

I gave her a quick bath, some more albuterol, a cup of milk, and put her to bed. She was out in almost no time. She woke up coughing and wheezing about two hours later. And again two hours after that. And lather-rinse-repeat all. night. long.

Sometime around 4 a.m., she woke up and I gave her the albuterol and tried to give her a sippy cup with some milk. While she was drinking, she wheezed and inhaled some milk, which made her gag and then throw up everywhere. All over both of us, the couch, the floor, the coffee table… heck, she even hit the remote controls. Girlfriend put some serious velocity on that barf.

You can imagine how thrilled Dave was when I woke him up at 4 a.m. to go clean up the barf downstairs while I got Cate and myself into the shower. Yeah. That was fun.

She’s still wheezing this morning, so we’re off to see the pediatrician in a couple of hours. The last time this happened, they gave her an oral steroid in the doctor’s office and it really seemed to help a lot. Hopefully the same thing will work this time.

But Miss Priss had better knock off this nonsense soon, because we’ve got a weekend full of birthday parties (little girl across the street on Saturday, e-baby on Sunday), and she needs to be her 100% fun, charming self for both events.