Things to Remember

This was today.

Doesn't the yellowness just make you feel like it's all alright?  I love the way a daffodil looks straight at the world.  A daffodil doesn't droop, it just holds it's petals out wide.  I feel like I could really trust a daffodil.

This was today too.

I heart a freshly mowed lawn.  Let me tell you what, this grass is soft on the feet and easy on the nose.  It sends me to the zenith of springtime giddiness to see it all laid out neatly and welcoming like that.

And that is also to say that today was a blooming, verdant, vernal day in general.  Sidekick Sister was feeling good enough to eat all three meals with some giggling in between.  And Captain K. ditched school and came home to me after his doctor's appointment.  He did his lessons so well and was such a sweet bub of a boy that it makes me sad to send him back to the vagaries of school in the morning.  I'm only comforted in the fact that I am sending strawberries in his lunch tomorrow.  So if everything else goes wrong for him, at least he's got his favorite fruit on hand.  The Little Linebacker made me laugh with his cleverness.  I thought he took a long nap today.  When I went to wake him up he was smiling his big laughing smile with our new iPad in his hands and an Iron Man cartoon playing on netflix.  And Baby Girl charmed the dickens out of me by laughing an uncontrollable laugh at my hammed up rendition of Goldilocks that Sidekick Sister requested to hear while I was doing the dishes.

And I can't leave out the snapping turtle.  Our neighbor brought by a snapping turtle from her yard that averted the lawn mower but, in classic out of the frying pan and into the fire fashion, found himself trapped in a little red bucket with a bunch of kids around who were sure he could be made more comfortable if only he had enough rocks, dirt and leaves piled on his shell.  We all went down the street, children in wheelchairs and splints and all, to release the turtle in a nearby field.  I'm sure we were quite the astonishing parade.

I want to remember all of that.

I also want to remember this.  I'm going to try to record hospital moments I want to remember over the next few days.  Here's the most powerful one.

I gave gassed out Sidekick Sister a kiss and left her on the OR table at 9:15 a.m.  I didn't see her again until 8 p.m. that night.  I was a pretty calm and collected mama the whole day.  I'll swear it on the holy Bible.  Then at 8 p.m. I followed a nurse to a deathly clean post-op alley and found my baby girl, my little bug, my Nanza waking up in a big bed with tubes running every which way out of her.  She asked me for water.  But the nurse said she couldn't have water.  Her little lips were cracked.

"Can I please have water?  I'm so s(th)irsty."

The nurse said it was too soon, that she would puke it all up.

 I wanted to dump the whole, darn, desalinated ocean into her throat.  But all I could say was, "Pretty soon little girl.  We'll get you water soon baby girl."

And then the nurse said, "The doctor wants us to do a CBC.  We're going to have to draw her blood."

Two nurses together tied the blue elastic tight on her arm and poked straight into her little vein.  Her red blood ran straight up a skinny clear tube and then dripped down into a tiny vile.  Sidekick Sister's eyes went wide.

And I thought, "Why am I doing this?  Why am I doing this to my little girl?  I want to get out of here right now.  I don't want to do this anymore."  I felt it all the way to the bottom of my stomach.  I felt it in my antsy feet.  I felt it in my head that was truly trying to figure out if it was too late to back out of it all, that was thinking through the pros and cons of taking out all Sidekick Sister's binding tubes and wheeling her in her big bed straight to our get-away car.  It was a real, deep, urgent need to flee.

In the very, very, very outer reaches of what could still be called me, I felt the distant pulse of, "you know this is right Jessica.  You know you have to do this."  But it took until my baby was settled quietly in her room for the night with her eyes closed before my passion to save my sweet child of a Sidekick Sister was overcome by my desire to see an adult Sidekick Sister without an 8 inch difference between her legs.

I want to remember that.  I want to remember that there are times of intense desire not to do the sensible thing because it hurts like delivering the head of a baby.  But you just have to push through because there is a lot of joy on that other side...even if that joy is going to be a long, long, long, long, long time in coming. 

P.S. - To the first person who can invent a way to get blood out of a child's body without using needles, I will award you with a very big plate of chocolate chip cookies.