HALFWAY

To me, parents with small children fall into two camps. There’s the one camp where the parents have worked out their night routines down to a tee and they’ve managed to plan bedtimes, train their children to sleep all night (without hearing a peep from them) and are able to get a perfect nights sleep more or less everyday. Then there’s the other camp, (which we have a gold card with), where the night routine has never ever been perfected and an uninterrupted night’s sleep does happen, it’s just once in a blue moon.

We’ve never mastered the bedtime routine with our kids. With Maddy we tried the “controlled crying” technique (too soft), the “sit in the room and move further away each night” technique (too boring) and even the “ambient background noise in bedroom” technique (too noisy), but none of those worked. In the end we just used the well known “sit with her until she goes to sleep and then wait for her to run through when she wakes up at any point in the night and then let her get into your bed” technique (so much easier). Harry arrived not long after Maddy and once again the bedtime routine for him started well. This was until the little monkey finally worked out why Maddy was always in our bed when he woke up. From that point it was a competition to see who would get into our bed first. Now, I know some people may think “Why did you let them do that?”, but to be honest it was always around 2am or 3am and as soon as they ran through and got into our bed they would just go straight back to sleep. It would’ve been a different story if they wanted to play. I suppose, as parents, you find a system that gets you the most amount of sleep and this was our system. There’s one couple I know who have a single mattress next to their bed and when their kids come through one by one during the night the dad just slips off the edge of his bed, onto the mattress and then they all go back to sleep. It never went to that extreme with us. Both Maddy and Harry eventually grew out of the habit of coming into our room and decided their own rooms were much comfier. The problem is Rosie has now developed the same run through technique, only this time it’s with added stealth. You could always hear Maddy and Harry coming a mile off, but Rosie has this unbelievable talent of not making a sound. She just glides through silently like a ninja and will get in the middle of our bed without creating a ripple. Most of the time I’ll roll over in bed and discover this little foot in my face and I’ll spend the next 5 minutes trying to work out how the hell she managed that. Charlie is still in his cot and we’ve trained him to go to sleep on his own without any bells and whistles and so far, so good. Apart from waking for his usual feed in the night he’s not too bad and anyway, you get used to the broken sleep eventually. Thing is, whenever they do have that rare night when they all sleep right through the night without a sound, we end up thinking something is wrong and will wake up to go round to check they’re all breathing ok just to be sure. We’re our own worst enemy. 😉

Pre chemo went well today. We saw the oncologist and explained to her about Sam’s skin and she looked to see if there was anything she could prescribe. Most of the tablets would muck around with her hormones so she was reluctant to prescribe any of those so in the end she’s given her some antibiotic cream that she can use instead. Hopefully this will help sort the problem out.

We’ve got an MRI scan scheduled for the 16th April where we’ll be able to see if the little git is responding to treatment and shrinking in size. One little encouraging sign is when the oncologist was examining Sam for the lump, she thought she had the wrong breast because she couldn’t feel the lump because it felt so much smaller. We won’t know the size change for certain until they do the MRI, so fingers crossed. If it has shrunk a lot and it is responding well then they may extend the FEC sessions for a while longer to give it more of a kicking.

As it is tomorrow is the last session of FEC before we move onto the T. Unfortunately, the T (taxotere) is a much stronger chemo and more of an evil bugger than FEC. It also comes with a whole different range of side effects but I’ll go into more details about that at a later date.

Let’s just concentrate on one FECker at a time shall we. 😉