Yesterday we headed off to the pediatrician to check out Cate’s asthma attacks. And I have to say, we picked our new group of pediatricians based on the recommendations of a couple of neighbors, but the first doctor that we met a few weeks ago left me totally unimpressed. I felt like he didn’t really listen to me, and he was very brusque with Cate and basically scared the pants off her.

However, yesterday we met with a different doctor, and I will absolutely be requesting this particular doctor from now on, because he was awesome. He was so sweet and gentle with Cate, she didn’t even cry when he looked in her ears, which is something that always makes her freak out. I mean, it’ll be difficult for anyone to match the love that I had for our pediatrician back in Washington, because she was fantastic, but this guy just might come close.

Anyway, we’ve upgraded Cate’s asthma treatments to the equivalent of her same medication using a nebulizer rather than an inhaler. Cate is definitely not a fan of the nebulizer, and honestly neither am I – it means we have to keep her distracted with cartoons for about 7 minutes instead of the 10 seconds that it takes to do the inhaler. But on the plus side, it really does seem to be help with her wheezing more than the inhaler did. It’s just hard because she gets bored and fidgety long before the medication is done, but if you’ve ever had a child in respiratory distress, you know that the inconvenience factor is pretty minor. Anything it takes to get her feeling better, I’m all for it.

The doctor also gave us an oral steroid, to help with the swelling in Cate’s airways. I got the prescription home, smelled it, and knew that there was no way that I was going to get Cate to swallow it. It smells vaguely like cherries, but it has a really strong chemical smell too. When it was time to give it to her, I set up with a big tupperware container and a couple of towels, just to be prepared for the inevitable gagging and barfing that I knew was going to ensue. And… she loved it. I guess even though it stinks, it must taste like candy, because she sucked the stuff out of the syringe without a single peep of a complaint.

She’s definitely feeling a lot better today, and has even eaten a little bit of actual solid food (when she’s sick, she goes to liquids-only; I guess it’s too hard to chew when you can’t breathe). So that’s great. And she only woke up once last night, for which I am extremely thankful.

So it looks like our birthday party-packed weekend will go on as planned. I wasn’t worried about her being contagious, because I figure we passed that point a few days ago, but I was thinking that we’d have to cancel if she was still wheezing and miserable. Fortunately, it doesn’t looks like that’ll be the case. Hooray for modern medicine!

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.

Yesterday, a few things happened that made me decide that it was time to start transitioning Cate to going to sleep on her own again.

1. I realized that we’ve been here for three weeks, which seems like a long enough time that she should be somewhat familiar and comfortable with her bedroom.
2. She only took a 15-minute nap (in the car on the way home from Target; she woke up when I was trying to move her from her car seat to her crib), so I knew she’d be too tired to put up much of a fight.
3. The previous two nights, she had woken up at some point in the middle of the night and spent the remainder of the night in between Dave and me in our bed, and that was like a flashback to her sleeping patterns when she was 10 months old, and we are not going back to that routine, no ma’am, no way.

So when she was obviously starting to fade at around 6:00 (remember, virtually no nap), I gave her a lightning-quick bath, put on her pj’s, and gave her a cup of milk. She fell asleep on her sippy cup, so I tried to quietly move her to her crib. As soon as her head touched the mattress, she woke up and started to scream. This is normally when I’d retrieve her, put her in our bed, wait for her to go back to sleep, then try to move her crib again. And lather, rinse, repeat until I finally managed to get her in bed without waking her.

Instead, this time I sat on the floor next to her crib, reached my arm through the slats to rub her legs, and talked very calmly to her about how much Mommy & Daddy love her, and I know she doesn’t like this, but it’s time to go night-night in her own bed like a big girl. She was standing up, biting on the crib railing and shrieking like her life depended on it. (I tried standing next to the crib so I could reach over and rub her back, but she grabbed my neck and tried to climb up me, so I figured that sitting next to her was better. But from that angle, the only part of her I could reach to rub reassuringly were her legs. Which, you know, whatever works, right?) I turned on her Baby Einstein lullaby CD, figuring that the music could only help her calm down – and if nothing else, it helped drown out the screaming.

She stood up in her crib and screamed for probably the first 20 minutes or so. Then she sat down and screamed for another 10 or 15 minutes. She spent the next several minutes sitting and just staring into space, tear-stained cheeks and pouty bottom lip. Finally her eyelids started to get heavy and she started swaying back and forth from the weight of her head wanting to nod off. A few minutes of that and she finally flopped forward with her head as close to the crib slats as possible. I kissed the top of her head through the slats, rubbed her back for a few minutes until I knew she was all the way asleep, and then left the room.

Of course, because she crashed before 7:00 p.m. and she’s used to going to bed around midnight, she woke up a little over an hour later. So after a diaper change and another cup of milk, we had to do it all over again. It sucked, and it took just as long, if not longer, to settle her down the second time. And I have marks on my forearms from reaching them through the crib slats as far as possible.

The thing is, even though not swooping in to pick her up when she cries goes against every single protective Mommy Instinct that I have, I know this is for the best. It’s not stressing me out like it did when we left her to cry it out. I mean, yes, she’s still screaming a lot, but I’m sitting right there next to her, comforting her as best I can without picking her up. She might not like it right now, but I don’t worry about her developing any abandonment issues since I’m sitting right there next to her the whole time.

Now I just have to commit to sticking with this, so I can get her back into the habit of going to sleep on her own.

Today, though, I loaded Cate into the stroller and walked to the grocery store, since it’s less than a ten-minute walk, and lord knows I need the exercise. We only needed a few things – enough that it would easily fit in the little storage compartment under the stroller. So we went and had fun, and Cate fell asleep in the stroller on the way home. I decided to just move the stroller into the dining room where I can keep an eye on her and let her take her nap there. No point in waking her up just to move her to her crib and do the 45-minute screamfest again. You have to pick your battles, right?