Sleeping baby

I have a sleeping baby in my bed right now. She has never slept till noon in her life! I keep going in checking on her to make sure she is breathing and to make sure she didn't crawl away to go play with toys when I wasn't looking.

I just went and checked again. Breathing? Check. Still in bed asleep? Check.

Last night we were traveling late and out of town when we pulled into Meijer to stop and buy some diapers. Ella started crying and within a few minutes was nearly hysterical. As Nick got her out of the car, he found her projectile vomiting in her seat - all 5 ounces that she had just eaten. It was disgusting and stressful and within a minute, I was flooded with more emotion than my body could handle.

We had to do this awkward naked baby clean-up in a dirty men's bathroom with hand dryers and wads of toilet paper. By the time she was clean and naked, she was back to her cheery good-natured self. But, not so much me.

I didn't cry during this fiasco. I have learned this very unhealthy method of dealing with the fear and pain I feel whenever we have an Ella episode: it's called "not feeling." How profound.

I don't know what to do with all that is before me some days. As of late, she can throw up between 1-5 times a day. I've been saying it's because she has had a cold for the last two months and a hole in her mouth and that together, it's hard to keep things down. (which is true). But, a small part of me is scared that something else is wrong and that it would be too much for my overflowing plate to worry and explore something else.

Each time she loses all that she just ate, I count calories. We are at such a critical point with her weight where she is too small for the doctors to be comfortable with and every drop matters. She threw up 154 calories last night in the Meijer parking lot. That is 154 calories that sets us back and puts the question of her surgery and general health back on the table. Those are not questions we can be having anymore.

And so, I let me dear baby sleep like a teenager today. I walk around with all this feeling wanting so bad to explode out of me and let me be free, but then who would take care of my children? Who would take care of me? She must be exhausted. I sometimes forget how it must make my sweet Ella feel to go through all these things herself. How I wish God would take all the pain we all feel away.

Until then, sleep, baby, sleep.