Pither.com / Simon
Development, systems administration, parenting and business

Not a week to plan

This week really hasn't gone to plan, in any way for any one.

Monday started out innocently enough. I had some out of hours work to get done during the evening, but it wasn't anything major.

When I went to bed at 4am on Tuesday morning, I was of a different opinion. Monday was a disaster! The work was at least all done and finally working but had taken far, far longer than expected (I personally blame the syncrepl system in OpenLDAP 2.3.27).

Tuesday started at the normal early time and progressed in a generally normal and pleasant way. I even managed to get today's out of hours work done early in the evening, leaving time for a little dancing.

However it was again all a terrible trick! This time it was Edward's turn to break. This was his worst night ever (so far) for sleeplessness. After an initial series of 30-60 minute naps up until around 1am, he just wouldn't go to sleep at all. In fact he spent most of the night not only awake but screaming about it.

On any night this would be rather unpleasant for us all. But on this night I had just packed a bag ready for a two day business trip to Guernsey. For which I had to leave at 6am to drive to Southampton for a flight.

I eventually took myself downstairs, removed the gate from the lounge doorway, closed the door, curled up on the sofa (it's not long enough to do anything else) and tried my best to ignore the screams from upstairs.

Edward eventually settled for another short nap about an hour before I had to get up and I managed to doze off fairly soon after the screams stopped. Then my alarm went.

The trip to Guernsey was pleasant enough, I quite like flying on such a small plane (9 passenger seats). The work was busy, with a slightly late finish on the Wednesday but at least there was a nice hotel afterwards.

Liz and Edward had a significantly worse day of it though. After a morning of Edward mainly screaming and not seeming to want to do anything else, Liz took him to the doctors. He was diagnosed with an ear and throat infection and prescribed antibiotics (which came with the added excitement that he might be allergic as Liz is). Liz was warned not to expect any sleep that night!

As expected neither of them got much sleep.

Thursday I worked while Edward developed a rash and returned to the doctors. They couldn't identify or find a cause for the rash though so just told Liz to keep an eye on it.

I left Guernsey on time and caught my flight back (descending from 6,000 feet to 1,000 feet completely surrounded by thick clouds is really quite strange).

Sadly there was still a strange PHP/OpenLDAP problem outstanding that was causing PHP to segfault on exit if a referral rebind callback had been setup. But hopefully it's just a PHP/OpenLDAP version mismatch that can be easily fixed (I shall post again when I know the answer).

Anyway, I got home to a very tired family. Edward did seem to be quite significantly on the mend though. He was actually smiling occasionally and starting to try and crawl and play around again.

He even managed to go to sleep (admittedly very late at around 11pm) and slept most of the night with only a couple of fairly short disturbances.

With Edward's rash spreading from his bottom and legs up his back and stomach we returned to the doctors on Friday afternoon. He got another check and it was confirmed that his ear/throat infection was getting better, although the cause of the rash was still unknown. The doctor didn't seem too concerned though and said that if it's still there Wednesday next week to bring him back again.

Saturday and Sunday have been gradually returning to normal and while we haven't managed a good night of sleep, they have certainly been better than earlier in the week.

We sadly had to miss a party on Saturday night, but it really wouldn't have been fair on anybody to leave Edward with babysitters. While he was clearly getting better, he was still very tired, rather grumpy and had to be manhandled to practically force feed him his antibiotics!

While still tired, today he has certainly been showing us that he's feeling better. He has been playing, walking and most notably climbing (pulling himself half way up the side of his play pen).

As for my biphasic sleeping plan, let's just start again from tomorrow.

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