Lil’ Neville is teething. She’s getting one of the top incisors.
It is making it hard for her (and, by extension, me) to sleep. She’s been waking up every two hours at night for three of the past four nights. The night before last, she did better, and I thought we might be past the worst, but last night was bad again.
She is refusing to eat solid foods. I’m still nursing her, and she is willing to do that, but she won’t let me get a spoon in her mouth, and she’s not terribly willing to eat finger foods. This is frustrating because we’ve been dealing with solid food feeding issues. We’re working with an occupational therapist, who comes once a week. We’ve been making progress in introducing foods, but now it feels like we’ve slid way back. It’s incredibly frustrating and makes me feel like a failure as a mom.
I’m worried about the solid foods thing because I’d like to try to go back to work after Mr. Neville’s sabbatical. I’d like to go back to work around January, but I don’t think I’ll be able to do that if she’s still mostly nursing.
Please tell me other people have been through this kind of thing and come out ok on the other side…
Sorry you’re going through this. It sounds hellish.
‘Two steps forward, one step back’ is par for the course in kid development, a lot of the time. It does NOT make you a bad mother. It’s just the way kids work - specially when there’s an excellent reason, like pain. It will be over, she’ll regain the lost ground on eating solids, and everything will be OK.
Meanwhile, I know some people don’t want to give their kids painkillers, but IMO there is absolutely no reason why a kid should be in serious pain when modern medicine can make it stop. Whatever the US equivalents of Calpol and Nurofen are, dose her up, specially at bedtime. Stick Calgel on her gums before feeding.
And like Moonlitherial said, frozen pureed fruit. Also frozen bananas (take them out before they’re totally frozen - if they’re too hard, they could hurt her gums).
And while you’re here and talking about backsliding, please tell me my four-month-old will someday sleep through the night again.
Giving her baby Tylenol is its own sort of hellishness. She hates it when we squirt it into her mouth. She’s got a sensitive gag reflex, and probably because of that does not like someone else putting things in her mouth. I give her Tylenol sometimes, but that’s its own ordeal…
Well… Lil Neville did sleep through the night, but stopped. She stopped when she learned to crawl. She’d wake up and want to crawl. But that would generally be one or two awakenings per night, not every two hours like now. I’m hoping she will start sleeping through the night again, soon.
Regarding baby tylenol, are you giving her the sweet Tylenol branded acetemenophen or something like Tempra? If you think the taste isn’t the problem then try just letting her bring the syringe/dropper to her mouth. If she likes the taste (and who doesn’t, that stuff is 99% sugar) then she may just start sucking and then you can just squeeze the dropper/depress the syringe every few seconds to give her a few drops at a time.
Try not to focus too much on the sleep thing, it sucks but it is temporary. My little guy woke up at least 2 times every night until he was one and now he mostly sleeps like a dream. One benefit of waking up at night is that they get plenty of opportunities to practice falling back asleep which is a pretty valuable skill for a baby to have.
My daughter looooooves taking Little Fevers acetaminophen. I’d try every approach I could to get some into your kid, it’s the humane thing to do.
The good thing about teething is that the misery stops abruptly. Your kid will be, well, like this one day and absolutely fine the next. Just hang on till it’s over.
My daughter cut her very last tooth last week. We had a party to celebrate the end of teething.
My daughter is two and she still doesn’t sleep. During he’s the best behaved little girl we could hope to have, she eats just about anything and hardly ever cries… but she just hates sleeping. In 25 months I reckon she’s slept through the night maybe 20 or 30 times tops. The only upside is that teething just kind of passed by unnoticed in the blur
At the moment she’s regressed to sleeping in bed with my wife while I go in the spare room. At least this way she usually only wakes up once or twice in the night.
Does she use a soother (pacifier)? Because you can get medicine soothers. You stick the dose of baby Tylenol or whatever in the soother, and the baby sucks out the medicine as it sucks the soother.
Ice will help. I remember when my wisdom teeth erupted at about 16 or so. MAN did that hurt. There are (or were, at least) numbing gels for sale which will help, too.
My father told me that the classic remedy was to rub a little whiskey on the baby’s gums, to numb them. I, uhhhh, think that this method is not recommended any more.
Poor little poppet. Not directly related to the teething (my kids did best with a dab of clove essential oil on a q-tip, but it tastes pretty yucky and shouldn’t be used for more than 3 days or it can cause irritation) but…has she been seen by a speech therapist lately? There’s some overlap in what OT and ST can do, but there are some concerns, including gag reflex and refusing a spoon in the mouth, with are more in the realm of ST than OT. Speech Therapists work with wee ones well before there’s actual “speech” involved. Might be time to ask for an ST evaluation.
How old is your daughter? Relax, you are not a failure as a parent. Kids can be difficult, and with little ones, it seems like progress is of the breakthrough variety as opposed to slow and steady.
My son is now almost going on 5. My son loved the grape flavored acetaminophen and ibuprofen, he wasn’t so wild about the cherry flavor. While he was teething, we gave him the acetaminophen at bedtime and the ibuprofen at midnight. This would help him sleep through the night. We could tell he was teething because he would be chewing on the rail of his crib and the furniture downstairs.
With respect to feeding, we’ve noticed it went in cycles and it was a take a step forward and take a step back. My son at almost five is still a picky eater, and a strange one at that, but we’ve made progress on what he’ll try and what he’ll eat.
We happened to be in Germany just before Moonbaby’s teeth started coming in. Our friends gave us an amber necklace; apparently it’s a common procedure for German babies/toddlers. Works as some sort of energy-balancing mechanism. May seem a little too “woo” for some, but our son expressed virtually no teething pain for the duration.
Mine vomited last week due to teething too. All over me. Last week was awful- terrible sleep, no eating, grouchy mood. And lo, yesterday a molar appeared. Now she’s the best kid in the world again.
Classic example of confusing correlation with causation, and how it can be harmful to the people who are least able to defend themselves: The necklace could very easily strangle the child, is worthless at best, and if the parent really believes in it, it would be used in the place of something which actually has a chance at working.
Last night was a three-nightshirt night. I got vomited on twice. In addition to everything else, now she seems to have a cold. We were awake for a couple of hours last night, when she just couldn’t get back to sleep.
Lil’ Neville would probably like an amber necklace- she likes to play with my necklaces. I don’t think it could actually stop teething pain, though (maybe chewing on it might help), and I would make sure it had a breakaway clasp.
