Sleep deprivation and a guessing game...

Excuse me while a fix up the toothpicks holding my heavy eyelids open. This is Day 4 of the sleep drought and I’m on struggle street. 

When you have a child with limited speech that struggles to communicate, an hour long melt down followed by hours of crying for ABC kids in the middle of the night can be extremely frustrating. Make this an on going thing and you turn into a psycho bitch zombi! 

Em’s melt downs have been full on with her kicking and screaming, twisting and turning while she screams the roof off. You can ask her until you are blue in the face what is wrong but she can’t tell you. We wouldn’t know if she has a belly ache, a headache or has had a bad dream. You can only comfort her as much as she will let you and start the guessing game.  

The trouble with guessing what is wrong is, for every wrong guess you make, it gets her more worked up. It’s hard and it’s heartbreaking at the same time. You just want to fix the problem but in reality you just have to ride out the storm. 

Since we are on day 4 of this extremely inconvenient new phase, I start thinking of things it might be. Maybe she has worms? Maybe she is gluten intolerant? Maybe she is having nightmares, has something happened that I don’t know of??  

As I’m about to leave the house to go get worming tablets and gluten free pasta for Em and a stronger dose of anxiety medication for me, Chris gets home with the little lady herself. She walks in chewing something with a frustrated look on her face. I have a closer look. She has wobbly tooth!!!!! Turns out she has had a new tooth coming through that must have been causing her grief. 

I’m not sure how she will go when it actually falls out, I’m really hoping she doesn’t give it to me and say “mummy fix it”. At least we know now why she has been having a rough time lately and I’ll be a little more sympathetic at 1am tonight. Fingers crossed this new tooth comes through soon and we can all get some much needed sleep.  

Nik xx