Priorities

Baby E is finally napping, after hours of acting tired and miserable but being unable to fall asleep.

She was awake until 1 a.m. last night with the same symptoms. The rash on her cheeks gets worse and she becomes very short-fused. She'll often say "ow" and pat her head or tummy.

This has been happening more often again the last few weeks. I wish I knew why.

I thought for a few weeks there that we were over the worst of this. Now I'm not sure if reality will ever allow anything other than brief lulls.

Is it unrealistic to expect that we'll ever reach a point where life is somewhat under control, with only rare and brief bad spells for Baby E? Oh, how I hope not.

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Baby E is insistent that she needs to use the potty, and wants milk. But then she sits and sits on the potty and can't go, or won't sit on it at all, or nurses for only a few minutes and wants down only to be asking for more a couple of minutes later.

I think she must be having stomach cramping and pain. She doesn't know whether to interpret that as needing to go potty, being hungry or what. All she knows is that she's miserable and wants Mommy--or does she?

She's fully in come-close-go-away-hold-me-don't-touch-me mode. She doesn't want to be put down and she doesn't want to be held. She just cries and throws one tantrum after another, whining and begging to be picked up only to immediately want down again. It usually culminates in throwing herself on the floor, screaming or moaning. Often when she finally does have a BM (and they've been abnormal) then she feels much better after that. But this can go on for hours, several times a day.

Today she's extremely tired and lethargic between tantrums. She was sitting with her head at an odd angle for a long time this morning, eyes half closed, looking like she was going to fall asleep sitting up. She didn't want her sisters anywhere near her, either.

I think I've narrowed the current trigger down to two likely possibilities: cane sugar, her reflux medication, or (as it seems likely at the moment) both. I need to do some trials with those two items, keeping careful records and taking before and after photos of the rash on her face.

It seems so unpredictable sometimes. She will be perfectly fine, happy, energetic and social until suddenly something triggers this reaction.

Then all of a sudden we're trying to remember what her face looked like 20 minutes ago and when the rash intensified. We'll be trying to figure out if the tantrum she had earlier was just a normal tantrum, or at what point she moved from normal tired toddler behavior into the over-the-top behavior that is typical of her reactions when she's in pain or has been exposed to an allergen. We're caught trying to discern whether she's crying and making the potty sign yet again because her digestive system is in knots or just because she doesn't want to go to bed.

When the allergy behavior hits the extreme, it's easy to identify. And, of course, the rashes help. But there's some point between normal 18-month-old behavior and the clear reaction behavior where the waters are very murky. Then it's so difficult to know how to respond to the situation.

Keeping the detailed records of her food, behavior and other variables is highly time-consuming. But it seems to be be something were going to have to make a regular part of our life--at least for the time being.

I keep thinking that eventually we'll figure out what all she can and can't have, and we'll be able to stick to that and keep things at a fairly good baseline. But then she develops a new allergy to something that seemed fine a week or two before, and I wonder if it will ever normalize. Or something she's seemed to tolerate well finally builds up to the point where she reacts to it.

I get so frustrated with it all sometimes.

Meanwhile, I'm wanting so badly to spend time with the older two girls, play with them, cuddle them, read to them, do school with them. But there's Baby E, desperately needing a nap, wailing and drooping, giving the false impression that if I just work on putting her down for a nap for a few minutes then she'll go to sleep and I can focus freely on the other girls. Then the few minutes turns into three hours, and I'm pulling out my hair.

When Baby E is not having a reaction she is so easy to put down for a nap, but her misery turns the routine upside down. I'll get her all ready for a nap, feed her lunch, read a story, sit her on the potty, and put her in bed--and then the diaper is full of diarrhea and we're in for a long wrestling match of her screaming and flailing while I clean her up and then perhaps have to give her a bath before I can again attempt to put her to bed.

Sometimes I find myself wondering why God didn't give me Baby E as my first child, so I could focus on her without taking away from other children. But I don't think I would have been able to handle her issues at that point in my life, and I certainly wouldn't want to not have the other two girls. There's not one of my children that I would give up or want to change the timing of.

I'm so torn. I don't know how to balance it all. I can only leave her screaming in her crib for a few minutes at a time, but I can't just let the other girls' needs fall by the wayside either. I end up struggling with her for hours, trying to get her to take a nap so I can focus on the older girls.

But if and when she finally falls asleep, I know I may not have more than 30 minutes to an hour before it all starts again. She doesn't nap nearly as well on the days she's like this. So then do I take a shower, or just go without for another day? Do I try to catch up on some housework and cook the next meal, or do I focus on AJ and M&M--reading to them, helping them with a craft, or doing some homeschooling with them?

Do I let my kids go hungry, leave them without clean laundry to wear, let them go without my time and attention, or neglect the one that's sick and in pain? It's not a pretty choice, no matter how you cut it. Especially when it's a choice that has to be made day after day.

Right now the girls are just finishing eating a snack. I chose to sit down while they were eating and have a few minutes of quiet letting off steam with this blog entry for my own sanity, but I don't know if that was the right choice or not. Maybe it will help keep me from snapping at them and spinning my wheels; maybe it was just a waste of time. Who knows?

I do know that the few minutes I spent in prayer this morning before facing the day weren't a waste of time. I'm sure that taking time to center and calm myself and lean on my Father for strength helped me get through the morning much more successfully than I would have otherwise.

Now I'm going to try to do some school with the girls, and hopefully start cooking dinner. There's very little chance that I can also manage to clean up the kitchen and do laundry, but I'll try.

All I know is that at the end of the day there will be things that seem to be priorities, that are on the absolutely-must-not-be-neglected list, that remain unaddressed. Deciding which things they should be is my daily puzzle.