Not So

I'm going to play a little more catch-up tonight. This goes over the first few months after my latest baby, Gideon, was born. Let the ramble begin.

Not So

I took Gideon to the doctors for his two-week check-up in February and was told he needed to see a cardiologist because he had a heart murmur. By a knee slapping well-I'll-be sort of coincidence, the appointment with the cardiologist was on the same day that Hannah was scheduled to have a hip surgery one-thousand miles from Gideon's cardiologist. Dan and I thought all would be well and decided to go ahead with Hannah's surgery because we're optomistic like that, which I think is mostly good, but occasionally it can spank your bottom, as it did ours in this instance.

Two hours after Hannah went under anesthesia I called my one-thousand mile away husband and told him in my wobbly, teary, my-socks-just-got-knocked-off voice, "Gideon has a heart problem and the doctor says we have to go to the hospital right now and that he needs surgery as soon as possible and that we'll be in there for, like, 7-10 days." And he was like, "Huh?"

I had to have the relief society president drive one-hour down to the big city to pick up my one-year-old that I'd brought to the appointment with me because, hey, it was just going to be an in-and-out sort o' thing so why leave my one-year old who bites with the babysitters innocent children right? So little Miss Bites-a-lot along with my other two kids who I'd left with the babysitter because they had control over their jaws, got to hang-out with friends for the next couple of days until my mother-in-law could fly a thousand five-hundred miles from the opposite direction of Dan and Hannah to take care of the poor orphans (and yes, the biter, during that time, bit).

But all the hospital stuff passed and Gideon came home doing well and Hannah was back in her super-pink, super-cast that went down her right leg and wrapped around her hip, and our kids were porperly mothered and fathered and everything seemed at least, you know, okay. And I thought we were all done with hard things.

But not so.

Gideon was on strict orders not get sick for six weeks...in the winter...with four siblings under the age of seven in the house. Enter paranoid Mom.

Hannah, while still in her lower-limb pink prison, got pushed by her little brother and was unable to catch herself. She broke her right arm.

Then I broke out in a rash that went all down my arms and then spread onto my neck and face. It lasted for about two weeks...two different times.

Then Gracie burned both hands on the stove-top and earned her own self an over-night hospital stay.

And Dan left for a work trip for a month in there too, just for kicks.

And I had chosen this year, of course, to homeschool Isaac.

I knew the first few months after Gideon was born would be rough what with him being a fifth and all. But when I was going through those months with all their little surprises, I think I would have described them as being more staggeringly jagged than rough, like shark's teeth you know? So maybe I would have said they were the double-cerrated period of my life.

But I would've been wrong. I've come to the conclusion that those months were actually kinda funny and not all morbidly double-cerrated at all. Really, those months were more like I was hanging out in a swimming pool and suddenly a shark was charging me and I saw his teeth all glintingly pointy in every direction and I realized his focus was way totally on me and then, when he stretched his jaw open just a little wider as he came within inches of slicing off my arm, just after I'd let out a hideously embarrassing screech, his teeth fell out, like iceicles off a wind-blown tree and his big toothless mouth flopped below his belly and he swam to the bottom of the pool and, with fins stubbornly crossed, he refused to ever come up again. And then, not meaning to disrespect the shark or anything, but just because I was so relieved and because the whole doggone, entire episode was so completely unexpected, I laughed.

That's what those months were really like.