“Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws.”
~Charles Simmons
A child lives above us and it’s been affecting me, not in cute baby ways. This baby must have something wrong with it, possibly really bad colic, and it screams for hours at a time, day and night – but mostly night. I haven’t had three hours unbroken sleep in weeks, but lately it’s been getting even worse both as to noise (which was pretty loud to start with) and duration (which was nothing to sneeze at either). I’ve tried moving to every room of the flat to sleep except the bathroom but it doesn’t work, nowhere is safe.
This whole past week I was sick from lack of sleep. I lost my voice for a while and had to call in for two days, apparently one day leaving a supremely loopy message on my supervisor’s answering machine much to the hilarity of my coworkers. Today I slept until nearly two – completely spacing a lunch date with a friend – who, weirdly enough, had a prophetic dream in which I had to cancel and then saw from a Facebook post from a couple days ago that I was ill and when I didn’t return texts to confirm assumed I was knocked out cold. Which I was. Apparently some of her ESP rubbed off on me because I woke up mere minutes after her phone call and was able to grovel appropriately and reschedule for an early dinner, but I missed a phone call from my sister-in-law inviting us to a nephew’s birthday party dinner tomorrow.
As I type this now, in the mid afternoon, the infernal child is wailing.
I’m exhausted, and I can’t even imagine how the poor parents are coping! I’m pretty sure at least one of them is a student at the university and this is finals week. This is not how I imagined wrapping up my last couple weeks at work and packing up the house…
Small Dog Syndrome 
Ugh, that’s terrible. I feel your pain. Our upstairs neighbors have two tiny kids, one on the way, and a yappy dog. They are excessively noisy from 5 am until midnight. But – we heard the tell-tale bangs of movers up there this morning, so we’re crossing our fingers…
Oh yes, you are definitely of our tribe. Fingers crossed indeed! We’re moving ourselves soon, otherwise I’d probably be much more irritated with our neighbors.
Earplugs? White noise machine/mp3? Or perhaps my old standby, offering Benadryl-laced teething biscuits to the wee thing?
Remember, if you want a good night’s sleep and some serious comfort soup, you can have that and more for the low low price of gas fare to Boise.
Boise is singing its siren song to me, old friend… Also, we should have a phone date soon.
I feel your pain, seriously. We had a SCREAMING baby (every night, 4am for months) in the bedroom below ours. I thought I would lost my mind. Thank God they moved out last year and it’s now a nurse who works the night shift. Score!
We have a baby above and a baby below – it’s been terrible. I’m not at all joking when I say it’s lessened my (already pretty low) desire to have kids and even shaken J.’s own mental potential timeline. I’m crossing my fingers for that kind of a neighbor next time!