One summer night Cody woke up with a hacking cough. This had become a regular occurrence, and I got up to try to calm him down. The only one thing that consistently seemed to stop the cough was to help him drink a sip of water every time he felt the need to cough. But even that was not working. I finally decided to take him downstairs and rock him until he could relax and go back to sleep.
Groggily, Kasey came staggering out of our room to try to help. Kasey is usually a very kind, gentle, understanding father, but when he gets woke up late at night, I would rather face an angry grizzly bear. So while I was desperately trying to keep Cody calm, Kasey was chasing him around the house and threatening him. He kept saying things like, “If you don’t stop coughing and crying, I’m going to drop you on your head!” This just upset Cody all the worse. He started running around in circles, whimpering like a little puppy, and trying to hide between my legs.
The one miracle of the night was that although Isabella shares a room with Cody, she stayed sound asleep in her crib the entire night. She was zonked, spread eagle on her tummy with her little head on the opposite end as the pillow, and her cheek pressed right up against the hard plastic head of her little dollie.
Kasey finally pulled himself together enough to start making comments that were at least halfway helpful rather than just empty threats. He looked at Cody and calmly said, “Cody, you have to stop coughing or you are going to make yourself throw up.” Right as he said this, Cody coughed especially hard and Kasey’s prophecy was fulfilled. Both Cody and I had to go change our pajamas. Luckily, my shirt caught most of the throw up and at least the carpet was saved.
After we got cleaned up, I took him in my arms and had a sweet moment with my son. I cradled him close and sang to him the songs I used to sing while I rocked him to sleep as an infant. At that moment I realized again how quickly life goes by and how precious it really is. About an hour later, Cody finally relaxed and fell asleep in my arms. I kissed his forehead and laid him gently back in his little toddler bed. I crawled back into my own bed and immediately started dreaming.
I was again awoken, this time by a blood curdling scream and, once again, bolted out of bed. I ran in to see what was going on. Cody was dancing around his bed shouting, “OWIE! OWIE!” I could tell that he was not fully awake, but I tried to talk to him anyway, and ask him where he was hurting. After a few tries, I finally figured out that he was hurting under his diaper. He is fully potty trained, but after drinking so much water earlier to try and stop the cough, I decided it would be safest to put on a diaper. I laid him down on the bed and opened the diaper to try and figure out the cause of his discomfort. And then, the unexpected happened. While my brain was very slowly registering what was going on, (it was very late after all) I felt a warm wet spray of liquid soak my new shirt. I had previously experienced this sensation, around the same time of night, about two years before. In fact, it happened often to my husband and I as new parents of a baby boy. My brain finally told my hands what to do, and I threw the diaper back around him. When he was finished peeing, I took his clothes off and ran to go change my own shirt, again. Kasey had gotten up in the meantime and when I came back into Cody’s room, he was staring at me incredulously and asked, “Why in the world is Cody in here by himself without any clothes on!??” Kasey often has the same problem that Cody just experienced of only waking up half way in the middle of the night so, try as he might, he could not figure out what I was telling him. I turned him back around and told him to please just go back to bed. He obeyed, and I proceeded to strip the sheets off the bed and get some new ones. Of course, none of the sheets that I could find were satisfactory to Cody, so we spent a few minutes trying to find something that he would be happy with. Finally I got him all settled back in bed, and just as he was about to slip into a deep slumber, he started coughing again.
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