"Sleep" Study

When Grace saw the ENT doctor in regards to her ears/adenoids/tonsils, he wanted to get a sleep study done. The doctor wanted to see if Grace was getting enough oxygen at night or if her adenoids were obstructing her airway in any way. Grace has ALWAYS been my best sleeper ever since she was probably 2 months old. She rarely gets up, never wets the bed and only occasionally needs a drink of water. She is always the first one to get to sleep and sleeps very well, and very rarely snores which was another thing they were looking for. I was glad to find out that the sleep study is done at home, thinking it would be strange to take Grace to the hospital just for her to sleep and either leave her there, which I don't know if I could have done, or have to stay there myself, which I could see as being not so restful either. All I had to do was go to the University of Alberta Hospital and pick up a machine that recorded oxygen and pulse. Easy enough - right??? Hahaha!!! Just getting to the hospital with three kids in tow is a challenge, and then our night began.

First off, I plugged in the machine and gave all the girls a stern warning not to touch it (heaven knows I wouldn't want to have to replace it if it broke!), and then I hooked Grace up to the machine. There was a little bandaid that was connected to a wire that wrapped around her finger that was connected to the machine. Easy enough - she's all hooked up and I told her it wouldn't work if she wasn't asleep, so she instantly closed her eyes and tried to hold very still. This was at 8:15pm.

8:45pm - Anna comes down and says that the machine is beeping..... of course, little fingers couldn't resist and they had loosened one of the wires. I hook it back up again and all is quiet for a while.

10:30pm - the machine is beeping again. Grace decided that she needed a drink of water and tried to get one herself.... not such a great idea when you have a limit to how far you can go. So, I get her a drink and hook up the wires again and we try again.

12:30am - Grace has tossed and turned enough that the wires are loose yet again.

3:30am - Sarah is awake and is not settling down very well. I go get her a drink of milk and check on Grace - she happens to wake up and needs another drink of water!!

4:00am - I give up - I try to snuggle Sarah in bed with Matt and go have a bowl of cereal since I am awake anyway.

4:30am - the monitor is beeping again! This time the bandaid has fallen off of Grace's finger, so we put it back on and try to get some sleep.

5:00am - Sarah comes crawling up and joins me on the couch where I was watching a late night movie. We both end up falling asleep there and so when 7:45am rolls around and nobody is awake yet and Grace has to leave for school in 25min - we start our day!! Of course we get Grace out the door with a quick bowl of cereal for breakfast, then I take a quick shower and try to get myself ready for the day.

Anna is next - her bus picks her up at 9:00am and by 9:10am I had Rebecca and Sarah out the door to take the machine back to the Hospital because it had to be back by 11am. After waiting for 10 cars to get into the parkade ahead of me and taking 10 minutes to find a parking spot, we squish into an elevator with 10 other people and make our way into the hospital to the sleep lab. It takes about 2 minutes to give it back and we make our way back to the parkade. I finally got out and then went to playgroup which we were 40 minutes late for because it took 1 1/2 hours to get to the hospital and back just for 2 minutes to drop off the silly machine. By now, I am done and I have to admit that my girls enjoyed probably a little too much Treehouse this afternoon, but, oh well.

I hope that all the studying I did last night will earn me a good sleep tonight!!!