Simone has been out of sorts for the last three days. I wrote quite a bit about what she has been doing on my blog The Alopecian Muse if you’d like to read about it. So what has she been up to? Making my life a living hell over the last few days. I have been in a perpetual Witching Hour that doesn’t seem to be easing up at all.
As of lately though, she has taken on a habit that is getting increasingly worse. She is chewing the wood on the top of her crib. When we first got the crib, it only had a few bite marks in it from the previous crib dweller, but she has taken gnawing to new heights! I’ll take pictures of it tomorrow (or maybe even a video) to show the extent of the damage that she has done. She has chewed up all the wood, but in the last three days it was so bad that she has started choking on the pieces that she manages to shred off the top. When I took her out of her crib this morning, she had brown stuff caked to her face. It was stuck there and looked like she just ate a brownie or a piece of chocolate cake. It was the finish on the wood. I opened her mouth and her back molars were filled with the wood finish. When I washed her face off, she had red markings that stayed the whole day. She has had breakouts on her hands from rubbing them over and over and I just thought it was one of her old habits coming back. (Stereotypic hand movements). But when I took her clothes off to give her a bath, she had welts all over her body. I know that she must have ingested some of the wood, and I’m particularly concerned about the chemicals that could be in the finish or the wood itself. I have been racking my brain trying to find the right solution to this problem. She is too young to put into a toddler bed, and if I attempted to do it she would never go to sleep. It would be very dangerous. Yet chewing the wood is just as dangerous. I don’t know what I could put on it to stop the chewing. What if I put something on it and it cause even more of a reaction? I have thought of wrapping the railing of her crib with a really strong, thick ribbon material that won’t shred or break easily.
The other thing that keeps happening is that her legs are getting stuck in the slats of the crib. She will put her legs through and then once they are in there, she can’t get them out. She tries and tries to get them out, and by the time I get into the room, the crib slats are all the way out up to her diaper and she is hurting. I used to have a bumper for the crib, but she totally destroyed it. She managed to rip the bumper from the strings that tie it to the crib. If I put something more cushiony and wider in, it will give her the ability to step up onto it and potentially try to climb out. Simmi doesn’t know how to climb on furniture, but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t attempt it. She can get her leg up pretty high to the side of her.
If anyone has any suggestion of a good way to wrap her railing or something else ingenious, let me know. I don’t want to have to get her another crib, but if I can’t come up with a good safe solution for her beaver tendencies, I will have to go to one of those standard cribs with a bite guard on it. This crib doesn’t have that option.
Tags: chewing crib railing, eating wood
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