One of those nights

Actually, it was more like one of those days.

Poor Campbell had his two-month check-up yesterday morning, which took two hours. The good news is that he's thriving - he's in the 90th percentile for weight. Neither of the girls was ever that big, not even Lily. The bad news is that he got four shots. The poor thing just screamed until he wore himself out. He slept for about 3 hours afterwards, tuckered out from the trauma I suppose.

Everything was fine until about 2:00 when he started running a slight fever. I didn't have any baby tylenol on hand, so Lisa brought some over, but it was expired. I decided to risk it out of desperation. He finally settled down and slept in his bouncy seat for an hour, which was good because Lily woke up from her nap in the guest bed in a puddle. I had to clean her up and strip all the sheets off the bed. Molly was over playing for a few hours, and Ella came out of her room at one point to tell me that Molly had had an accident. Time to get another child cleaned up.

Brandon has really made a point in the last two months of being home for dinner and bedtime, but last night he had a client meeting that he had already rescheduled once, so I fed the girls soup and bread and butter for dinner and promised them cartoons if they did a good job eating. I turned on Pink Panther cartoons for them and gave Campbell a warm bath in the hopes of calming him down because he'd been crying for much of the past hour. Not even carrying him in the baby bjorn had helped. He loved the bath and was content to sleep on my chest for about an hour. But then I had to get the girls ready for bed, and he woke up and started crying again.

I managed to get the girls in bed and settled Campbell down successfully, so I worked for about an hour until the baby woke up again - crying. I spent much of the next two hours trying to calm him down. I finally took his temperature, and it was 101. All of the baby books say to call the doctor immediately if an infant's temperature goes over 100.4, so I called the on-call pediatrician. She said that since he was an otherwise healthy baby and had just had his shots, she was pretty sure the fever was just a reaction to them. She gave me a list of things to watch for, and if any of them happened I was to take him straight to Children's Hospital.

Campbell finally fell asleep in our bed, so I went to check on the girls. As I walked to the front of the house, I noticed the smell of poop. I looked at the dog, who looked at me as if to say, "I didn't do it. Don't blame me." Turns out Lily had pooped in her sleep, which she hasn't done in years. Let's just say the clean-up was disgusting and leave it at that.

At this point I called Brandon, whose phone wasn't working right - it kept kicking straight into voicemail. Campbell woke up crying, and I joined right in.

I told my mother that the evening's events rivaled the night that Lily threw up on Ella who had just had an accident. I can laugh about that one now, but it's too soon to laugh about this new episode. Give me a year or so.

The good news is that Campbell's fever is down, and he's sleeping happily in the middle of our bed. The girls are actually playing well together with a minimum of screaming. The only bad thing is that Brandon has to work all day. It's going to be a long one.