Namine had to sleep last night with her Holter monitor on, which did not exactly please her. She asked me repeatedly last night to please take her purse off, which of course I couldn’t do. I explained that she needed to keep it on her – as well as the stickies, leads, and wires – until the morning. She didn’t like it, but she accepted it. She disliked it a little less when I told her that keeping her “purse” meant no bath that night.
I never got the chance to talk about this, we’d been so busy. Late last week, one night when I was giving Namine a bath, I was rinsing her hair and a little water got into her left ear, and I swear I have never heard her shriek that loud. We knew that Namine’s left ear tube was loose; we’d found out a couple weeks prior from the pediatrician. After a call to ENT, we were directed not to bathe her unless she had ear plugs in.
Namine was already terrified of anything coming near her ears. Q-tips? No way. Ear drops? Sure, only if we hold her down. (And that really does require both of us; the kid is strong.) So bath time, which used to be an enjoyable time, became a 20-minute long screaming session, especially when it came time to wash and rinse her hair.
Or at least, it was until yesterday morning. But I’ll get to that.
So that morning after breakfast – which, being around 10 or so, was more like brunch – I told Namine that I wanted to give her a bath. We were going to go over to Jessica’s mom’s apartment for lunch, and I wanted to get as much of the stickies off of Namine’s chest as possible. (I have quite the experience with this by now, and I already knew it would take more than one bath to clean everything off.) To be perfectly honest, I expected a fight, or at the very least some whining.
But Namine surprised me. She just said to me, “Okay, Haha.” It was what we’ve seen before: it was Namine deciding that she was no longer afraid, and what would be, would be. The bath itself? Without incident. No whining, no crying. Just like before. I honestly have no idea if Namine was afraid or in pain; she showed nothing of either, but with her, that often means little. (And tonight, too, Namine had fun in her bath once again. Whatever the trouble was, it seems to be gone now.)
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