Alex's First ER Visit....And Croup In Our House

Alex had her first ER visit in the middle of the night last Wednesday evening. She was fine all day and then in the middle of the night...well actually it was only 9....I heard her crying. I went up and checked on her and she had had an accident in bed and so after I cleaned it up and changed her PJ's and sheets she was really worked up. She was coughing really bad and she was wheezing. Well she ended up falling back asleep and then about 30  minutes later she woke up wheezing and coughing again. I thought it might be croup because of the way she was coughing. I quickly looked up stuff online, emailed a friend who's son just got over it, and Chris called Nana to talk about it too. Everyone said the same thing - put her in the bathroom with hot steam, take her in the cold air, etc. It looked like she was having  a hard time breathing and we wanted to be on the safe side and so Chris put Pj's on her (totally crazy mismatched Pj's) and took her to the ER at 11. They were there until 1 and they gave her some medicine there and it seemed to help because when they got home Alex slept with us in our room in her sleeping bag. She didn't really cough and then the next evening she wasn't wheezing anymore. The next day, however, she got a slight fever and had that for 2 days but she was in good spirits.

Fast forward about a week and then Camden got a fever. He, on the other hand, was not in good spirits while he had a fever. He was up about every hour. I was able to just rock him to sleep and then go back to bed. But he was up again the next hour for the whole night. The next day he was super tired and fussy and actually fell asleep on me, which never happens. He had very fussy periods and kept his fever all day. The next night was worse. He was up again but he could not be rocked back to sleep this time. I stayed up with him for a few hours through the night. The day after that then he finally seemed to break his fever...but boy was I tired!!!

So I thought we were in the clear. We were for about two days and Camden went to bed like normal but around 2 am I heard him coughing like crazy. Yep. He got "the croup" too. With him I took him in the bathroom in the hot steam and then bundled him up and we went out and sat on the back deck for a while. He sounded better out there. I just felt bad for him. So I tried several times to put him back to bed but he just cried and I didn't want him to be breathing heavy. So we looked at books and he wanted to play (at about 4 am now) and well I let him go and look at books and crawl around on his floor. Finally after several more attempts to put him to bed I took him over to our bed and put him in bed with us (it is now 5 am) and we slept and he was up at 7 for the day. Super tired again. Luckily the next day was Saturday and so I was able to take a nap when he napped during the day.

Saturday during the day everything seemed to be back to normal. He took some naps and went to bed ok and slept well. I just hope this keeps up. I did some sleep training with him a few weeks ago and I hope it is not all messed up now because during those sick nights I tried feeding him. He hasn't had much of an appetite though, even during the day, for formula. I'm thinking we will be cutting back on the bottles which actually works out because next month he'll start drinking milk.