Emily’s First Cold

There’s a first time for everything, whether it’s your first day at school, your first day at work or your first kiss. As parents, we’ve currently been experiencing something decidedly less welcome – Emily’s first cold. If you have children, you know in the back of your mind that at some point they’ll be unwell – except of course it doesn’t make it any easier when it actually happens.

In Emily’s case, we had the first indication of something being wrong when she woke up four times during the night on Tuesday. Normally she is a very good sleeper who settles without too much fuss, wakes up once towards the morning for a feed and is normally back in bed again within about 20 minutes (this pattern has been going on for several weeks now, making for one happy mummy and one very well-rested baby).

On Tuesday however, she hardly ate anything at bedtime and simply wanted to go to sleep. I didn’t think much of it, assuming she just wasn’t hungry (since she has been eating for England lately, to the extent that the word ‘weaning’ is honing perilously into view), and wasn’t surprised when she woke up again hungry just after midnight. From that point she kept waking up every couple of hours, but again I assumed that perhaps her lack of bedtime feed had thrown her sleep patterns into disarray.

However, after both of us enjoyed a lie-in on Wednesday as a result (one which still enabled me to be up in time for the Jeremy Kyle Show, which is of course the pinnacle of daytime viewing for the  discerning woman on maternity leave), it became apparent by Wednesday afternoon that something wasn’t quite right. Little girl was coughing, sneezing, had a runny nose and was generally grouchy.

We put her to bed as usual on Wednesday night and for a while she seem to drift off quite comfortably, but she woke up around 10pm and was clearly not a happy bunny. The Calpol was duly brought out (which we have never had to use on her before, not even when she had her jabs), and her initial reaction upon being given it was to pull a face, scream even louder and then vomit up her entire bedtime feed.

Eventually, following some handy advice from NHS Direct, we were advised to keep her elevated, which resulted in my going to the car at around midnight to retrieve her pushchair. It was worth it though, since she slept in it on and off until around 4am when she once again woke up a tad distressed. Having managed to calm her down, we tried her with another dose of Calpol an hour later and this time it stayed down. It also knocked her out to the point that she then slept like a log from 5.30am until 8.15 (and so did we!)

A visit to the very nice Dr Chris (as he is now known) this morning confirmed that she is suffering from an upper respiratory tract infection (basically a posh name for the common cold) and we were advised to persist with the Calpol, as well as getting a prescription for saline nose drops. Emily was understandably miserable this morning but felt rather better this afternoon following a long nap. On waking up, however, she was none too pleased to have both saline drops and more Calpol foisted upon her (and I just hope the strawberry taste won’t put her off eating strawberries in the future),but her appetite had returned and she was a bit brighter.

This evening she’s gone to bed a bit earlier than usual, dressed up in a candy-striped sleepsuit (making her look like a tiny prisoner), and pink sleeping bag, all dosed up with vapour rub on her chest and back. She went off to sleep very calmly and peacefully, and fingers crossed it stays that way.

Despite it all, she’s been a very brave girl and still managed to give us some little smiles, even at 5 in the morning when she was clearly feeling unwell and exhausted.  In doing so she displayed more stoicism than many a grown-up who might break out the Lemsip and crawl into bed feeling sorry for themselves at the merest hint of a sniffle – even though she must have been terribly confused as to what was going on. Let’s just hope she’s feeling better in the morning.