{"id":646,"date":"2004-08-26T13:18:18","date_gmt":"2004-08-26T20:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kattywilly.com\/blog\/?p=646"},"modified":"2004-08-26T13:18:18","modified_gmt":"2004-08-26T20:18:18","slug":"shes-still-breathing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/?p=646","title":{"rendered":"She’s still breathing"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Instinctually I am listening for the sound of her breathing or to the
\nsound of her swallowing, and if those noises sound okay then Iím
\nlistening to the sounds of the house to make sure monsters donít come
\nout of the walls to hurt her<\/a>.” <\/p>\n

I’ve talked about my much less severe version of this before but can’t remember if I’ve
\nwritten about it. When you become a parent you stop sleeping, or
\nyou learn so sleep with your ears open. With our first child I
\nremember being awake in the middle of the night, lying in bed thinking
\nabout the horror I would experience if we woke up in the morning and
\nour daughter wasn’t breathing. After some period of time sitting
\nthere awake and worrying I would get up out of bed, walk to the nursery
\nto check and make sure she was still breathing. And then spend
\nsome time there watching her continue to breathe until I felt safe in
\nletting her stay they breathing so I could go back to bed. <\/p>\n

Some
\nof this stemmed from a neighbor we had whose baby would stop breathing
\ndurning the night. They had some sort of monitor that would alert
\nthem when the baby stopped breathing and they would rush to wake the baby up and
\nget the breathing started again. And there is a whole other story
\nabout the a-hole that lived in the next unit and called the police
\naccusing these poor parents of child abuse because they wouldn’t close
\ntheir windows on the odd occasions when the baby was crying itself to
\nsleep.<\/p>\n

That heightened sense of awareness has returned (or perhaps never
\nreally left) so that now when the girls are sick and cough or sniffle
\nat night I hear them and sit awake in bed wondering if there isn’t something I could do, some
\nmedicine I should give them to help their symptoms so they can get back
\nto sleep. The end result is the girls are actually sleeping
\nthrough the night and I sit up all night worrying that they aren’t
\ngetting sleep \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

And then when Chelsey was becoming a toddler she would fall out of bed
\nat night. I would hear the “thump” and bolt out of bed and rush
\nto her room expecting some sort of bloody horror from having hit her
\nhead on the night stand or something. She was usually just
\nsleeping there still on the floor. We would put her back in bed
\nand I would go back to bed, heart racing a 1000 mph and try to get back
\nto sleep. The worst would be when I would hear the “thud” rush
\ninto their rooms and both were sleeping soundly still in their beds.<\/p>\n

And did I ever tell you about the time when Cindy gets up out of bed in
\nthe middle of the night, starts walking towards the girls room, not
\nresponding to any of my questioning as to what she is doing, only to
\nget to the hallway by the girls room, make some very strange hitching
\nor hiccuping breathing sounds and proceeds to fall backwards into my
\narms and falls unconscious. I don’t think I’ve ever been that
\nterrified in my life.<\/p>\n

Breathing<\/a> and sleep are wonderful things. I look forward to the
\ndays when I can sleep that deep dream filled sleep through the night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Instinctually I am listening for the sound of her breathing or to the sound of her swallowing, and if those noises sound okay then Iím listening to the sounds of the house to make sure monsters donít come out of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kattywilly.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}