Croup: Season 2, Round 4

I lied. The NEXT post will be about HAIR! :)

So. Elijah's Cough has been lingering in his body since Thanksgiving. It's been on a little roller coaster, getting better, almost non-existent, then worse and disturbing his sleep and up and down and up and down. It has not really gotten BAD, though, not the BAD that we saw last year, but it has not completely gone away, either. Yesterday Cough kicked things up a notch and I could hear in the way Elijah was breathing that he was probably going to get croup, so we gave him a preventative dose of steroids and a nebulizer treatment before bed.

At 10:00, just as Dan and I were drifting off to sleep, we heard the stridor over the baby monitor and we began our family Croup Drill. This was the worst episode so far this year, and it even rivaled some of the scarier episodes from last year. Elijah got pretty scared when he couldn't catch a breath and that made things worse. Dan took him outside (I wonder if our neighbors think it's weird that we occasionally like to hang out outside in our underwear?) so the cold air could open up his airway. It took a few minutes, but as always our little trick worked. We gave him an epi neb and put him back to bed and listened to quite a bit of coughing throughout the rest of the night.

He is still junky this morning and I'm sure Cough will be hanging around and disturbing sleep throughout the Porta household this week like a champ. At least our little boy is safe. I will never get used to those scary episodes. They certainly do a good job of freaking me out.