Grin and Bear It

Huh, apparently I have been decompressing. Apparently, also; I cannot decompress and write at the same time. Witness recent lack of post.

It has not helped matters that the wee sore throat that started for Dadguy during the Hospital-Two-Penny incident turned into a full blown sick. Plus a continuance of my tummy distresses and Pearl also has not exactly normalized. Her schedule is off, and she now feels so good that even when she IS tired, she doesn't want to waste it on sleep.

Yesterday we finished decorating a graham cracker gingerbread house, one of four that were started on a Sunday a few weeks back. Also last night I made each of the girls a new bed-buddy out of unused portions of a quilt I made a few months back. For those of you who do not know what a bed-buddy is, it's a fabric pillow thing that is full of grain instead of stuffing. Toss the thing in a microwave for a minute or two, and voila! Better than a hot water bottle or electric heating pad, and safer too. They are especially wonderful when kids feel sick in their tummy's. We tend to have a hard time keeping track of them in this house, so the more that exist, the better. Like fingernail clippers. I have discovered that once I had saturated the household with approximately ten pair, I can usually find one pair within a one minute search.

Speaking of fingernail clippers... I have been meaning to document the following:

In order to get the girls to sit still for the weekly clip, I whump them on my lap and sing them the following song:

Snip snap snooper
Poop-ed as a looper
Snip snap snooper
Bippity bappity bop

As a result of this, LaLa calls all nail clippers... snip-snaps, only she pronounces it "nip-naps." I'm fairly certain that she knows the real name for this tool, as I KNOW for a fact she knows what the heck a ball point pen is called.... yet today she asked for a purple, sparkely pen by requesting her "pockelly draw-draw."

Ummm... any way, I'll be giving them each a new bed-buddy for Christmas.

I don't think that I have mentioned lately how much I love my neighbors. Last week on the evening before the initial procedure that sparked a hospital half-marathon, I had reached my full level of freak-out stress. Dadguy noticed I was not at my... ummm... best, and ordered me out of the house, suggesting that I take myself out to eat. I walked two doors down and knocked on my friend K's door.
I may have said something like..."I have been kicked out, can you talk?"
She looked at me and said, "I'll get my car. Meet you in the driveway."

We got Chinese and talked for an hour and a half even though she had just that day gotten on antibiotics for a monster sinus infection. Y'all, I have great friends. This is to say nothing about all the neighbors who took my girls while Pearl and I hit the ENT's office on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then for a while after that, just because they thought Birdie and LaLa could use some fun time away, and I could use some quiet. My neighbor from two doors down the other direction brought dinner to my MIL and the girls while we were gone. Heck... my MIL who took two days off in a row to stay with the girls while getting by on sketchy, scary half updates from a bad cell phone connection. My big sis waiting in the wings to take up any slack.

How do folks do this kind of thing with no back-up?

There's one interesting tidbit I have learned from this though. When it looked like it was the worst possible diagnosis... it was bearable. I have long worried about what would I ever do if one of my girls was hurt or even killed. Would I survive that kind of pain? How would I hold up, would I fold or would I be there for my kids? Here is the interesting part... you bear it. You walk through it. Maybe it's easy for me to say because we did walk away unscathed (relatively), but I have an inkling now of how parents do it. Parents of children who do not dodge the bullet... MS, Leukemia, catastrophic birth defects, car accidents.... you bear it because you must, and then you find a safe place and cry your guts out, wipe the tears and go back to bearing it.