on being freaked out of your mind

clint & holland are in the er right now. she's okay.  i'm okay.  NOW, i'm okay.  but i wasn't about an hour ago when we started hearing these weird barking noises coming from holl's room.  rushing in there, i pick up sleepy holland, who then pukes up her milk & barks a little more - she's not breathing well.  wheezing.  having trouble getting air in.
she has to be able to breath!
how can she go from perfectly normal to having trouble breathing?
i'm freaked.
she starts calming down & seems happy.  breathing gets easier.  (for me, too.)
i remember how glad i was when hudson started being able to talk.  i hate guessing @ what's going on.

having kids sometimes feels like an exercise in how to handle emergency situations.  like on friday night, when we heard a thud & sprinted around the corner to find hudson on the floor, head in hands with blood running down his chin.  yeah - totally freaked me out.  
he's okay by the way & what they say about the mouth bleeding alot is true. they do.


it turns out in emergencies, i do okay.  i'm fairly calm on the outside - doing what needs to be done & comforting when i need to.  but the inside?  i'm like pudding.  i'm scared to death.  thinking any little thing is wrong with your kids is terrifying.  i guess clint & i got on the face track with learning how to handle something being wrong with your kid.  day 3, to be precise.  i will never, ever in my life forget the feeling of rocking tiny hudson, trying to get him to eat only to see that his little body was too weak.  then the neon orange of the feeding tube & the tape on his tiny fragile skin.  oh my good gracious, i felt terror like i had never felt before.
of course that story has a happy ending.  a happy, somewhat stinky 3 year old who busts his lip with out blinking an eye!  okay, no he cried & was pretty upset, but anyway, you know what i mean :)
i know this story of holland will be fine.  they say it's probably croup & i really i'm more worried about germ-a-phob clint in the er than little sis.  haha.  just kidding, but he is freaking out a bit! 
this story will be a collection of stories we tell, of stories we've lived.  & i'll add it to my ever growing collection of times i've felt totally freaked AND times i realized everything will be okay.
and THAT is the story of parenting and also, i think the story of life.
the end.

decisions

today we went for holland's 6 month check up.  & that meant a shot.  sad.  just one shot, though since we're spacing her vaccines out.  & speaking of vaccines, do they stress anyone else out???!  i know they do because i've talked to lots of you.  of course on one hand, they're miraculous medical concotions that our great-grandmothers could only dream about, but on the other i can never get away from the "what exactly are you injecting into my kid?" kinds of questions.  i have friends who swear by not vaccinating until 2 yrs old & friends who swear by every single vaccination, every single visit.  i guess i'm somewhere in the middle.  which means we'll be visiting our doctor very frequently these days to be sure we get all of our shots, just not all @ the same time.  as vaccines go, i guess all you can do is decide what you feel is best & go with it.  really, that pretty much sums up a good deal of the "mom job description" - trying to figure out what the heck to do & then trying to feel good about whatever decision you make.  do i spank, not spank?  how about time out?  is it working?  do i let her "cry it out", or go get her?  should i let him yell through the grocery store, or take him out & spank him?  by the way, i took him out & spanked him, if you're wondering, but it totally back fired on me because with holland in the baby bjorn, i could barely lift him out of the cart.  by the time i won the fight of getting him turned over enough to swat, i had little force left to make it a real spanking.  it ended with us both laughing.  needless to say, he really learned his lesson.

really?

really? seriously? holland is still rustling around, NOT SLEEPING after no morning nap????

really? hudson just woke up after less than 1.5 hrs of a nap when he should have been SO tired today???

really? clint will probably be late getting home??

really????? ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


*time to remember to be thankful. time to remember to be thankful. time to remember to be thankful.....