Saved by the Beanbag

I can't believe it's been 1.5 months since I last wrote! There's been some drama with Baba G during that time, so I'll post about that today.

I'm gonna get you!

Shortly after my last entry in mid-April, Baba G started waking up in the middle of the night, screaming his head off and looking like he'd just seen a ghost. I mean, it was the freakiest thing ever. As soon as we'd hear him, we'd flip on the video monitor and see him bolt up in his crib and frantically run from side to side like he was desperate to escape. The good news was that within 5 minutes he'd drop back down onto the mattress and appeared to be sound asleep once more. I had been convinced it was "night terrors" (not the same thing as nightmares), but not everything fit that definition. He seemed too young, the episodes didn't last that long, they occurred later in his sleep cycle, and he WAS consolable. The first few times he did this, my husband rocked him for a bit, and that worked. With night terrors, he wouldn't have even recognized my husband, and nothing would've been able to calm him down.

We put three nightlights in his room, figuring that perhaps when he woke up and found himself in the pitch-blackness of his nursery, it was scary and he panicked. For one evening the soft lights seemed to distract him when he awoke and stood up. But after that night he went back to crying and crying.

This whole mysterious process went on every night like clockwork for a week or so, and then one evening I sensed something different about his wails. It just may have been the only moment in his 15 months with us so far that I truly felt some sort of "mother's intuition" kick in. So I told my husband to switch on the monitor again and after he did, he bolted out of the room without saying a word. Then I grabbed the monitor and saw that sure enough, BG had one leg over the railing and was about to flip out.

I could hear my husband running like hell through the condo to get to the nursery, and it was like I was watching BG in slow motion as he was dangling on the crib railing. I am not proud to admit that I let out a blood-curdling scream at that point ... but thankfully my husband got there in time. (The next morning I actually asked the neighbor two floors above us if I'd woken him up — that's how crazy my scream was. He claims he didn't hear a thing.)

The rest of that night none of us slept. My husband rocked BG for a few hours while my mind whirred about everything that could've gone wrong. Then I went to relieve my husband in the wee hours, and finally we put BG back in his crib and he decided to stay put. The next day we called the pediatrician.

Not Baba G, but I love this kid's face.

At his appointment it was revealed that he had a nasty ear infection in one ear, so of course my husband and I then felt terrible. We had just taken him in to get his ears checked less than a month prior, so I guess I didn't think that could've been the issue. He went on antibiotics for 10 days... and nothing got better. I mean, he didn't succeed in jumping out of his crib, but he did keep trying and he was still waking up screaming almost every night.

So we took him back to the pediatrician and now the infection was in both ears. WONDERFUL. They switched up his meds and we hoped for the best. By this time we'd also moved a big beanbag into the nursery and positioned it where we thought BG would fall, should that ever happen.

It's a BIG beanbag.

Fast-forward to a week ago. That night BG woke up screaming again, my husband turned on the monitor and bolted ... but this time he was too late. He found BG face-down on the beanbag. I didn't actually know this until about two hours later, because my husband had taken the video monitor with him (he didn't want to bust into the nursery if BG went quickly back to sleep on his own or was no longer trying to escape, and it's hard to know what's going on in there otherwise). When he had successfully put BG back down he told me what happened, and you can rest assured I didn't sleep at all the rest of that night. Again.

So last Saturday we went back to the pediatrician, assuming the ear infection was still raging in both ears. But it wasn't — everything had cleared up. I hope this doesn't sound awful, but in a way I'd almost wished that had been the answer. Now we just had to figure out why BG was trying to fling himself out of the crib.

That evening he slept through the night... but then on Sunday he did it again, this time landing on his back on the beanbag. This past week he's tried it one more time, and my husband used the microphone on the video monitor to holler "No-no! Go back to sleep!" while he was simultaneously running down the hall. It worked. BG snapped out of his hysteria, looked around his crib, found his stuffed monkey and snuggled down with him. Phew.

I feel like I need one of those signs factories have that say "We've gone X days without a safety incident!" We're at 5. Let's hope that number grows. I'd like to return to BG challenging us in other, less-injury-courting ways, like this:

Sure, I can feed myself.

Wish us luck, and have a great Memorial Day weekend!

- e