Ultimate guilt trip

I think we had our most parent guilt-inducing experience to date last Tuesday night. Evelyn went to bed around 6:30pm as usual. I went off to pilates at 7 and came back an hour later. Shortly after that, Evelyn started crying, which was really unusual, especially that soon after being put down. Because we sleep trained Evelyn, and because she wasn't crying that hard, we left her alone. She continued to alternately cry and fall silent for about an hour, and then she stayed quiet.

I crept into her room around 9pm to close her windows and throw a blanket on her, and was struck immediately by the smell of puke. "Oh no," I thought. I felt around her crib in the dark, and sure enough, there was vomit all over her bed, and worse, all over her too. The poor girl was sleeping in a pool of her own puke!

I got John, and we went into the room and turned on the lights. Evelyn was sound asleep, and her eyes remained closed as he picked her up, put her on the changing table, and removed her damp pajamas. Eventually she started opening her eyes, one eye glued shut either by sleep or by dried puke, or both. She was just sitting there on her changing table, naked and in a daze, looking around and wondering what in the world we were doing in her room in the middle of the night (to her it was anyway).

Gradually she came out of her daze a bit and started smiling, watching quietly as John changed the sheets on her bed and gathered up some clean clothes for another bath. There were dried bits of puke all over Evelyn's face, ears, neck, head, and her chest, arms, and legs were all damp and reddish.

Throughout her bath, she had the sweetest and softest smile on her face, and she kept her body twisted so she could look and smile at her papa the whole time I bathed her. We have never seen her so mellow, and it killed us! As John put it, she seemed grateful. She had none of her usual impatience and annoyance with the bathing and dressing process. We joked that we should wake Evelyn up every night for a midnight bath -- it sure was easier than our usual bath routine!

Freshly bathed and dressed, again, I nursed Evelyn once more and put her down for the night, again. She was such a trooper through the whole thing. She wasn't asleep when I put her down, and just looked up wonderingly at me as I raised the side of her crib and left the room. Then all was quiet and she went to sleep on her own. John and I finally went to bed, exhausted, and we both lay there feeling awful.

I'm sure this is the first of many such guilt trips, and in the grand scheme of things, this is nothing. And on the spectrum of "good" and "bad" parents, I think we're still pretty good! Lord knows there are much worse things that happen... so, if the worst thing that's happened to Evelyn so far is falling asleep in her own vomit, well, she's got a pretty life.