Thursday, December 21, 2006

After Monday night, I can totally see this

L. has hacked her way through a pretty nasty cold in recent days. For the first time in her short life, we gave her cough syrup more than 2 days in a row. Monday was her 4th day on the juice. She was pretty restless going down to sleep, which we attributed to her congestion and so gave her one last dose of cough syrup. Five hours after her last dose 'BOING' she woke up climbing the walls.

I pushed Mr. W. out of bed and told asked him to tend to her. He spent two hours chasing her all around the living room in a futile effort to get her to settle down and go back to sleep. At 3, the exhausted Mr. W. brought the little darling to our room. She shrieked with joy when I got out of bed and raced to me with her arms high above her head. This is the position she usually assumes when we pick her up from daycare. I scooped her up, and she cackled and gave me kisses all over my face. This is not normal for a toddler at 3 am, they're supposed to be asleep or crying, right?

Anyway, I carried her out of our bedroom, and closed the door behind me so Mr. W. could get some sleep. L. wanted nothing to do with sitting still, and continued her frenzied running around the room. She played with stuff, she climbed on stuff, she grumped at me for not getting down on the floor with her. After 45 minutes of those shenanigans, I realized there was nothing I could do to settle her. So, I went to work in the kitchen and ignored her. Somewhere around 4:30, she collapsed on the floor and went to sleep. She didn't even sigh when I scooped her up and plunked her in her crib.

Today I see an article that includes a bit about kids abusing cough syrup to get high. The ingredient in question? Dextromethorphan. Three guesses as to what was in L.'s cough syrup... and three guesses as to when we will give her that stuff again...

M.W.

3 comments:

Builder Mama said...

Just out of curiosity, what kind did you give her? We use Delsym and love it (plus it lasts 12 hours).

Our other issue (as we found out this week since Monkey Man has a cold/allergy thing going on) is that he takes so many allergy meds that we have to be careful what we give so we don't double up on anything with antihistimine. I swear I should've gone to pharmacy school.

Hope she's feeling better soon! And you get some sleep. Egads.

Mrs. Wheezer said...

We used Robitussin infant formula. I haven't heard of Delsym before. Does it have dosing for 2 year olds?

Builder Mama said...

Yes, it does have 2-year old dosing. 1/2 tsp every 12 hours for kids aged 2 - 6. But it's strictly for coughs only, nothing for sinus or any of that other stuff. He tends to get "allergy cough" as I've dubbed it, so I use it instead of the multi-symptom stuff.