Monday, November 07, 2005

Whoops! World's Worst Mom Strikes Again!

So, our overnight low last night was in the high 30s. Seeing as how it was quite chilly, we dressed Elizabeth in a warm pajama outfit for the sojourn to sleepytown. It was one of those terryclothish feety pajama outfits. The classic toddler wear.
And that was all fine and good on its own.

However, my loving husband has a penchant for building the biggest, hottest fires possible in our woodstove (our only practical heating source).
I think it has something to do with the latent caveman instincts lurking dangerous close to the skin of the modern man. Fire. Good. Hot. Good.

So, Bob stokes up a whopper of a fire last night and we adjourn to our room on the other side of the house from the woodstove. Elizabeth's room, on the other hand, is on the SAME side of the house as the woodstove.

About two hours after she went to bed, and about an hour after I fell asleep, Elizabeth appears in our room flushed, hot, not crying but clearly agitated.
I pick her up and notice that she is oh, you know, a split second from spontaneous combustion. She's burning up.
I immediately am washed over with a wave of tremendous guilt for having apparently tried to give my child heatstroke.

I take off her feety pajamas, lay her in my bed and give her some cold juice and a wet washcloth.
I took her temperature and it was a relatively mild 101.1 degrees. That's relatively mild only considering how bad it could have been.

I shut down the fire and opened a window to let some heat escape. Eventually, the house cooled off, the baby cooled off and my hot temper cooled off too.
Elizabeth was returned to her cooled-down bedroom at 1 a.m. and slept great for the rest of the night.
I however, had nightmares all night long of cooking my baby.
Lesson learned.

2 comments:

cube said...

Don't feel bad. Our oldest got heat rash as an infant from being overdressed. They won't remember...unless you blog about it and they rea all about it later in life...uh oh.

Jessica said...

Doh!