This has been a rough week. I think I have lost some major "mom points" this week. Tuesday night on the way to a meeting someone backed into the side of my car in the parking lot of our apartment. Baby's first car wreck. We are both fine, just damage to my car... which I need to call the insurance company about again. Thursday I babysat 2 kids here all day (about 7 hours). They were great kids! My kid, on the other hand, didn't handle it so well and was completely overstimulated and exhausted by the end of the day. Oh, and it turns out she is extremely competitive! But, that's another post. Also Thursday my Dad's truck, which Jonathon is borrowing until he comes back to the states, died. No idea why and haven't had time to get it looked at. Which makes us a one car family again. Blech. (If anyone would like to give us another vehicle, it would be greatly appreciated!)
Friday morning, I broke my toe on a baby gate. It hurt. A lot. But even more frustrating is the constant inconvenience. It is significantly better already, but it still hurts and half my foot is bruised.
Sunday afternoon Jonathon left for a retreat and that night all hell broke loose here at home. Promise was doing her "clingy/whiny please hold me while you fix dinner, that's why you have 2 arms!" thing Sunday night. I stood her on the floor while I was getting things out of the refrigerator and when I turned around she pulled a glass bowl out which, of course, shattered at her feet. Yeah, why wasn't I paying more attention???
Oddly enough, her feet and legs were fine. Somehow, she got a nasty cut on her pinky finger. SO MUCH BLOOD! I was holding her, trying to console her, and trying to get a look at the finger as blood was dripping all over the place. I took her into my bathroom looking for a washcloth or something to hold pressure on it. Blood all over my bathroom. I then took her to her bathroom (better light) to try and get it cleaned up. Blood all over her bathroom. I couldn't see anything in it for all the blood so we ran it under cold water and sat in the floor trying to put pressure on it. Which didn't work well because she was squirming and crying and fighting me like I was trying to take her finger off! There was a huge piece of skin hanging loose and I was worried about pulling it with her flailing about and making things worse. After an hour of this I called the nurse hotline for my pediatrician's office. What do I do? They didn't call me back and I was starting to panic. I tried to call my cousin who has 4 kids and whose husband is a pedi - if she didn't know none would, right? No answer. I called her mom, who called a nurse friend who told me I had to hold her down and put pressure on it for 10 minutes.
Okay, here goes. 10 minutes of firm constant pressure. Still bleeding. A lot. The nurse hotline finally called and told me the same thing saying that if it didn't stop take her to the ER. I called a friend to find out where an ER is around here but decided to try 10 more minutes. It STILL didn't stop. But it did slow down enough that I could get a look at it. It was gross. I went back and forth trying to decide if it would be more traumatic for her to go to the ER or for me to keep trying.
In the mean time I put her in the bath tub so the blood was contained and I spoon fed her some food because all of this happened as I was fixing her dinner and she was hungry. Hungry never makes a bad baby situation better. It just adds to the chaos.
In the end, after 2 1/2 hours of bleeding and crying. I was able to get a bandaid on pretty tight. I nursed her and she started dozing in my arms. The bandaid was on tight enough that blood wasn't leaking so I put her to bed and went in to check on her frequently. It held through the night. Praise God!
The next morning she woke up crying hard at 5am. I took the bandaid off and it started dripping again. What the heck?! I put Neosporin on it and a new bandaid and brought her in my bed hoping she'd snuggle and maybe go back to sleep. Ha. Who was I kidding? She had terrible naps and cried off and on all day yesterday. Today has been significantly better. No more blood. Still a nasty looking cut, but I think we will all live.
Sigh. This was probably one of the most awful nights of my life. I'm sure I will say that again some day. I know stuff happens and kids get hurt, but when its your own kid! and she's so little! Needless to say, I felt like a terrible mom! One, for letting it happen in the first place. Two for freaking out so badly and crying almost as much as she did instead of being strong and peaceful for her sake. And three for not knowing how to handle the situation on my own.
Oh well. We survived. Lesson learned. I love that kid so much. Being a parent taps into a whole new set of emotions than I knew before. I could feel her pain. Seriously. And her fear. And her confusion. I could feel it all. And I felt so helpless to make her understand. I knew she was looking to me to make it better. And I knew that in her eyes I was only making it worse by squeezing her poor little finger. Oh, what God must feel when we cry to Him. It's heavy.
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