Yep get the little ogre some grommets, work great. BTW did you know young surfies in Australia are called grommets? Seems every second little kid who surfs needs them to stop infections.
Hang in there, the teenage years are a breeze.
:rolleyes:
Welcome home, curlie. I hope you had a pleasant trip.
Hey, they want to think they are special, they should expect some retorts. I think I’ve been fairly restrained. 
Thank you, it was! Tho very cold
If only.
Yes, you are quite right - why should I not point out every time parents try to claim that only their lives could possibly be as stressful when so many here have zero respect for any other lifestyle choice? And yet, I was polite and restrained enough to not say anything when the claim was made that only a parent could possibly suffer this much and non parents would never understand. Yeah, whatever. It was still your choice, suck it up and quit trying to pretend you couldn’t have possibly known child rearing wouldn’t lead to trouble and lack of sleep.
Yes, it’s sad that the OP’s child is having ear trouble, but for him or anyone to believe that only a parent can suffer as much is bull, not to mention rude and self centered.
That knowledge that you “asked for it” doesn’t help much at 2 am when you haven’t slept and have to go out the door at 5 am to go to work.
And no, parents don’t really “opt for” in the sense of actively choosing to go without sleep. It’s a well known side effect of infants, but it’s not one anyone wants. It’s like saying an Olympic athelete “opted for” shin splints, stress fractures, and knee damage. No, that’s not really what they “opted for”, it’s a side effect of the real goal yet still painful. Real pain, you know.
Also, some babies are worse than others in this respect and there is no way to tell in advance what sort you’ll get. So for some parents it really is worse than for some other.
My second son had this problem and much the same history. In the end he had the tubes (called grommets here) and all was well eventually. He too had the bad gut due to the powerful antibiotics. We found the problem eased a bit when we took him off milk and started giving him soy milk instead.
I did not. I just caught chickenpox (at 45!), got fever close to 40 C/105 F, headaches, cough, sore throat and of course rashes.
As a bonus, a tooth began to hurt yesterday.
Fuck the world too.
Will you please point out where the OP or anybody has said this?
What we did say is that noone can possibly understand the stress of parenting until they have experienced it. This is true. I was a Nanny for two years when I was younger, and it was nowhere near as difficult as being a parent. Hearing your child in pain is 100 times worse than being in pain yourself. Combine that with sleeplessness and you have a recipe for true torture.
For a second, I read this as, “He died in his sleep, so my life got easier.” :eek:
WTF, do you thread laces through them? Silly foreigners.
Thanks for the kindness and understanding, Dopers. The Ogreling appears to be somewhat on the mend. He got ten hours of sleep last night (and so did we, thank Og). The Culturelle appears to be making a difference as well. He ate everything in sight yesterday, and had a massive (and mercifully solid) poop today. TMI? Fuck it. Parents and non-sociopaths will understand.
A few specific responses:
I appreciate the suggestion, but this is one of those things you literally have no hope of understanding unless you’ve been there. Please don’t think I’m being condescending, but a lot of times, the presence of two sets of hands is absolutely necessary. He wakes up screaming because he’s in terrible pain. Because he’s in pain, he has thrown up all of his dinner in his crib. Emesis is literally dripping from his mattress, and is soaking his outfit and his hair. It’s fairly cold in the house, so you need to get him cleaned up, changed, medicated comforted, and warm immediately. Time is absolutely of the essence. Seconds matter. At the same time, you must get the crib sheets and floor cleaned up so you can eventually put him back down. Now, with the Ogreling, the throwing up doesn’t bother him so much, but being hungry does, so we have to medicate his ears and get some food in him as well, or he’s not ever going back to sleep. I suppose you could try to do all this in a stepwise manner by yourself (and single parents do it this way by necessity, God help them. They have my respect and awe.), but for the child’s good, it’s much better if you divide the labor.
As for losing our cool and hurting him, yeah, no. It won’t happen. That’s another thing you won’t be able to understand. I’ll run myself into the ground and die from exhaustion, but before I do so, I will arrange for his safekeeping and place him gently in his crib. I know parents shake their children and do all sorts of other awful things, and because I’ve been through times of absolute exhaustion and ungodly stress, I know what they experience. But no.
Yeah, I have an acquaintance who used to brag to me that he never got up in the middle of the night, that his wife did all that stuff. Yeah, you’re awesome, dude. :rolleyes:
Yeah, most of them, but they inject it with this infuriating dose of knowing humor that is entirely unjustified. “Ha Ha! Yeah, life sure is funny! My dog licked me right in the face at 3AM. Woke me up! Took me 10 whole minutes to get back to sleep! Hey, why’s yer face all purple?”
As for the guy who remarked that I knew having kids would be tough, he was just being a prick. He has that reputation around the place. I backed him off.
Jesus. Yeah, I hope so too. Your lips to God’s ears. Please let me know how he’s doing. They tell me that this first two years will be absolute living hell in terms of repetitive infections, but after that, he’ll have a titanium-plated immune system. Please let it be so.
Replying to all the related “get the tubes” posts:
I’m convinced. This last experience (he’s had ear infections before) was so heinous that, next time, I will not resist the idea of tubes, assuming, of course, that we still don’t have to face it this time. If it will bring him immediate relief, and prevent future problems, let’s do it.
I know the tubes themselves are safe. My resistance has come primarily from the fact that it’s still surgery under anesthesia, and he’s still just an infant, y’know?
Also, as for curlcoat, I’m well aware of curly’s M.O. She will get no response of any description from me. May I please ask that the rest of you follow suit?
I can’t imagine how scary it must be, but my WAG is that this surgery is one that they do often enough that it’s very low-risk. Some friends of mine have a daughter with severe heart and digestive system defects due to some missing genetic information, and she’s been through some pretty crazy surgeries just fine. Which isn’t to downplay your kidling’s problems at all, but just to say that when they’re capable of doing things like rebuilding a baby’s circulatory system out of other bits of its circulatory system, sticking tubes in ears has got to be a comparative cakewalk.
When my stepson was born, his lung collapsed within hours. It turned out that he had a congenital heart defect that could only be corrected with a type of open-heart surgery that had only been developed within the previous decade. In the NICU, he was placed next to another infant boy with the exact same problem. The other boy died after the surgery. He lived. So even though I wasn’t there at the time, my wife has told me enough about that experience that I can say yeah, I know.
I hear you. That’s why Fang didn’t get his until he was 14 months old.
Good luck.
EAT: Conga-rats on the the full night’s sleep. I always would get nervous the next morning after a good night. I’d think that something bad must have happened during the night. He wouldn’t have slept through the night like that." Stupid pessimism.
Talk to his doctor about it. This is probably one of those procedures that is better done when he’s healthy, so see if the doc thinks that the benefits will outweigh the risks. Some little kids get a LOT of ear infections, so the Ogreling might be better off to get the tubes in as soon as he’s recovered from this latest attack.
Shot From Guns Oh damn. The not waking up was just temporary. He got up in the morning as he has every morning since then. 
How about in the OP where he was telling everyone fuck you because the things that were causing them stress couldn’t possibly be as bad as what he is currently experiencing?
You all want to claim that no one can know how stressful parenting is until they do it, yet you wave off all other stresses as “not as bad” even when you have no experience with them. If the OP wants to strangle someone because they feel they have the right to consider their stresses as bad/important/debilitating as his, I’d say he is over reacting and very self centered. And of course, it appears that none of the parents agree.
Did you hear that sound swiftly passing overhead?
Bah. I’ve been hung over after drinking too late, I’ve been woken up in the night not falling asleep for at least ten minutes :eek: , I’ve tried those things. They were a breeze compared to an infant with chronic baby colic. They were a walk in the park compared to being woken up at 4 AM by the child having vomited all over himself, the bed and the floor and cries inconsolably, because of the sickness and the shame, and you don’t know where to start cleaning vomit, because it’s all over the place. They were downright fun compared to seeing your child shaking uncontrollably, only the whites in the eyes showing, and you can’t make any contact at all because of fever cramps. That’s downright terrifying.
I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve got the T-shirt to prove it. I’m happy I did, but I’m not doing it again for a million Euros, and those of my colleagues who have small children are cut all the slack they need, and I sympathize thoroughly with them.
Douchebag.
Ogre is your baby kept at home with your wife during the day or is he in daycare? My daughter was in a fantastic daycare for the first year or so of her life. The workers were wonderful and the other kids were great with her, but my daughter was constantly sick! She had 4 ear infections in the span of about 5 months or so.
We left for unrelated reasons and switched over to a much smaller daycare in a family friend’s home. She is religious about cleaning the house, toys, the kids’ hands, etc. In over a year at the new place my daughter has only had a few fairly minor colds. Huge difference!
If your son is at daycare and switching facilities is an option, you may want to consider it.
Either way though I would say go for the tubes. We were really close to getting them and would have if the ear infections had continued.
And just in case you haven’t tried some of these her are a few suggestions for when the little one is sick.
[ul]
[li]Humidifier in his bedroom[/li][li]Prop up his head. I put a rolled up towel under the mattress.[/li][li]Consider having the baby sleep in a carseat, or something similar that will allow him to sit more upright. This will help enormously with the pressure from being so stuffed up, the post-nasal drip, etc. You may want to clear this one with your pediatrician first. Some (like mine) recommend it while others are totally against it.[/li][li]Saline drops to clean out the nose. I didn’t use them much but my pediatrician swears by them.[/li][/ul]
Good luck. I hope the little guy is back to his old self soon!