Bad Dreams

My baby has bad dreams.

Right at this moment, she's sleeping in her swing (not on me!  yay!) and she's whimpering in her sleep.  It's the saddest thing ever. 

As someone whose nightmares range from spontaneous mud abortions to being a serial killer, I don't much care for bad dreams, and part of me wants to wake her, but I don't think she'd thank me.  And what can she be dreaming about?  Probably not being a serial killer, or being stalked by one.  Is she dreaming of a retreating nipple?  Someone forcing a bottle on her?  Nothing bad has ever happened to this child, not yet.

Well, I suppose that isn't strictly true.  She got a vaccine on Friday, and as if that wasn't bad enough, on Friday night she had a reaction to it.  Her thigh got hard and hot and red, and her temperature spiked.  We gave her Tylenol (she's not pure anymore!  She's had drugs!  She is ruined!) but it took a little while for it to kick in.

And those twenty or thirty minutes were the hardest I've had to endure with her.  We've had crying fits before that, but those were just that--a girl who was crying and needed to get through it.  This was something else.  This was my baby hurting, and not understanding what was happening to her, and me being unable to help her. 

I held her and rocked her and sang to her, and eventually she fell asleep.  When she woke up the fever was gone, and while she was still a little shaky, she was otherwise okay.  Whatever ill effects there were seem to have passed. 

I know that she can't possibly have only good experiences in her life, and that if by some miracle she did, she'd be a boring and annoying individual that were she not my daughter I would probably dislike intensely.  But oh, how I want that for her.  I want her never to fall down and scrape her knee, never to kiss a boy and have him ignore her the next day, never to fail a test, never to be lonely.  But when she does do these things, because she will, I'll just tell her it's okay.  Because it is.  And I'll tell myself that too.