Killer Headaches

Last night after watching 2 episodes of season one of Chuck while massaging Big Daddy's aching back (multitasking at its finest) I snuggled into bed at a lovely 11:30pm. At 1:30pm I hear the Monkey come into our room, as he often does, to sleep on the floor next to my side of the bed. Shortly thereafter I start to hear the wee sniffles of him crying. Unfortunately I know all too well what this means - the Monkey has another one of his spike through the head headaches.

Last spring he started to get them once every three weeks or so in the middle of the night. I am starting to feel more confident in my theory of dehydration headaches combined with growing pains. He is sprouting like a weed and he did have wake in the middle of the night leg pains in his earlier years. He didn't have one all summer but yesterday was the first day of homeschool group. This means lots of running around and talking and excitement.

No matter what the source, they are super terrible for him and for us since we feel completely helpless to assist our poor suffering little fella. We have tried - drinking water, Tylenol, homeopathics, cranio sacral, massage, visualization, whoodoo voodoo, you name it we have tried it.

So 1:30am - crying, Tylenol at and a little massage. 2:30am - threw up from headache on white carpet at the foot of our bed. 3:30am - threw up again but made it to toilet. By this point I was weary of trying to sleep just to be woken up again but finally my body allowed me to drift into slumber until the alarm went off at 8am for my 9am meeting.

It was a teacher orientation for the UUAA from 9am to noon. I must admit that I have a very hard time sitting and being talked to for three hours even with breaks. Doing it sleep deprived was a true test. To make things even more challenging my full coffee cup dumped over on the floor of my car on the way to the meeting and all they had was tea when I got there.

Tea was not going to cut it for a three hour meeting so at break I snuck into the kitchen and dumped a couple of tablespoons of coffee into my cup and poured hot water over it. As the meeting reconvened I strained the coffee through a paper towel into another coffee cup to be transferred back to my original cup after I rinsed all the grounds out. That did the trick.

After much talking and "get to know you" activities (that I was so not in the mood for) the meeting ended and my husband walked in with a not so happy presence. He was dropping off the Money for choir orientation but the moment I saw him I remembered I was supposed to take his car that morning so he could take the van to pick up a generator from some friends of ours in Ann Arbor to take to our other friends in Ypsilanti who just closed on their house yesterday, but they have no electricity until Monday and there is no time to dilly dally since they are 38 weeks pregnant with their second child and the carpets needed to be cleaned before moving stuff in.

I then found out he tried to pick up the generator in the Buick and got stuck in traffic on the way to Ann Arbor since it is a football Saturday. En route his phone died and he got stung by a yellow jacket while driving. The generator did not fit. He drove to the UUAA to drop the Monkey off and swap cars to go back and pick up the generator just to find out the choir orientation was canceled. Whoops.

All of this before noon.

The day mellowed out after this but I am waiting for just one day or absolutely nothing. Someday a nothing day will come and I will not know what to do with myself.

Addendum: Later that day I was pulling out of the drive way and got half way down the street before I noticed that the BRAND NEW library book I am reading was on the roof of the car. I slowed to a stop but apparently not carefully enough because the book slid off the hood and I drove over it. I immediately jumped out and pulled it out from under the back wheel a little rumpled. It is a hard cover so it held up ok. I flattened out the pages and stuck it under my butt the rest of the drive to flatten it. Shhhhh.... don't tell. ;)

Book I am Reading:

Birth Day : A Pediatrician Explores the Science, the History, and the Wonder of Childbirth by Dr. Mark Sloan


"California pediatrician Sloan has helped deliver more than 3,000 babies, and he marvelously captures the precarious nature of childbirth—both its joys and its anxieties—while treating readers to an informal and captivating history of the medical practices surrounding birth in America. Sloan shares his first bumbled attempts at delivering babies as an intern, which leads him into reflect on why doctors persist in having women lie down to give birth when standing or squatting are better physical postures for it. Sloan ranges surely and splendidly over epidurals, cesarean births, premature birth and neonatal nurseries, as well as the state of an infant's five senses at birth. For example, he points out that the fetus not only smells the foods its mother eats, it remembers them after birth and tends to like what it remembers. Sloan counsels that women cannot prepare for labor, because events change rapidly during the process. He advises women to surround themselves with the people they love: unlike other labor pain relievers she may choose, their benefits will last the rest of her life."