Last night's bedtime story (as in, a story about bedtime, not a story that will induce sweet, peaceful sleep) went a little something like this:
At 7:00 (about 90 minutes after first dinner), Addy starts smacking her lips and chanting "Tens, tens, tens. Manummy Nummy Nummy Nom." So I decided to see if she was hungry. She ate about 4 animal crackers, half a jar of peas, and drank some milk. That's after she had eaten some cooked apple bites, 4oz of turkey and rice dinner, 4 or 5 animal crackers, and some milk for first dinner.
At 7:45 we went upstairs and started bedtime routine, including doing a nebulizer treatment and giving her some Zyrtec to help dry up the congestion (and hopefully help her sleep better). By 8:30, we had the lights off and I was trying to snuggle her while singing the totally made-up mommy original song "Sweet Adelaide Is Getting Sleepy." I got through 6 or 7 verses of the song, but the last one went something like this:
Me (singing): Sweet Adelaide has 10 little toes...
Addy (popping up from a deceptively restful pose): Tens! Tens!
Me (not singing): No, sweetie, you made the tens all gone, remember? It's sleepy time right now.
Addy: Tens! Manummy Nom!
Me: Let's just snuggle.
(Addy laid her head back down to pretend to snuggle.)
Me (singing again): You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...
(Addy pops up again, this time signing "more"): Tens!
Me (not singing): Really? You had second dinner not that long ago and decided you were done.
Addy nods yes. "Tens!"
So we went back downstairs, where she coughed up a yuck-o snot wad and then proceeded to eat third dinner, which consisted of 4 more animal crackers, the other half of the jar of peas, and some more milk. At one point there were two bite-sized pieces of animal crackers sitting on the highchair tray and Addy decided to pick one of them up and share it with me. I tried to politely decline, so she decided to drop it into the jar of peas. I was not successful at thwarting her, so we ended up with animal cracker marinated in puree of peas. Yes, I have been watching way too much Food Network lately. (Supposedly that's a developmental milestone--dropping small objects into a container--but I was really not in the mood to praise her for achieving it.)
Then she wanted to play. Only, she didn't really want to play. She wanted to race with me from the living room/play area into the kitchen so she could sit in the cats' water dish, because what could possibly be more fun at 10:00 at night than to need fresh jammies and a diaper because you've decided to take a sitz bath in the cats' water dish (never mind that the cats would probably want some fresh water in that situation, too).
At this point it was almost 10:00. Not a terribly unreasonable time for me to go to bed, but way later than I was hoping for since I (a) am sick and (b) theoretically needed to get up at 2:00AM to give Addy another nebulizer treatment. And definitely too late for Miss Sunshine to be heading to bed. Fortunately, we had several episodes of "Veggie Tales" on Netflix streaming, so we had watched one of those for about 20 minutes until she finally calmed down enough to fall asleep. You see, it turns out that Albuterol has the power to take a sick kid and help them to feel some better by opening up their airways. But it also has the power to take a mostly well kid and turn the crazy dial all the way to 12. Since Addy seems to be doing so much better, we're being a little more selective in how often we use the nebulizer today.
