Coming Up Collins: A New Day

I am amazed sometimes at how a new day can bring such a renewed sense of everything-is-going-to-be-okay...at the end of yesterday, I was emotionally drained and felt haggard...but this morning is already so much better.

So yesterday...I decided to get the kids hair cut. After an hour and a half of sitting in the salon, I was so over trying to wrangle the kids to sit still and quit spilling water on the floor, etc...but as soon as we left, my mood was lifted because of this gorgeous weather...so it didn't matter...

I should mention that BEFORE going to get the kids haircuts, I had taken them outside to get a few pictures before Ayris was going to chop it all off...as we were coming in, the kids wanted to bring some rocks in with them. I said NO and told them to leave them on the doorstep...that we could go outside once we got home and they could play with them then. And we did...we went back outside later in the afternoon. Again, they asked if they could bring the rocks in. Well remember that mom who commented a while back about saying NO a little less and YES a little more? She should have just stuck to saying NO.

I asked Ayris if I could wash her hair because they had put pink stripes all in it and I wanted it out. While we were doing that, Asher decided he wanted to give his rocks a bath...at which point, Ayris decided she wanted to give her rock a bath. Ayris' rock was about 10 times...maybe more, the size of Asher's little rocks. After bath time, I was getting Asher set up on the bedroom computer to play some PBS games while I dried Ayris' hair...she had asked if she could dry her rock off because it was wet...sure, whatever...no big deal. Until the rock fell from the counter down onto her big toe. Long story short, I took her to the emergency room to get it checked out...after about 2.5 hours of being there, nothing was broken and she only had a surface scratch/tear underneath her big toe (that they finally found after about 45 good minutes of them peeling back her entire toenail) that was causing it to bleed profusely. She was sent home with 10 days of antibiotics and some Tylenol with codeine.

I have decided now, after this night of hell, that it'd be easier to be like that mom on the Chuck E Cheese commercials that sends her kids outside all wrapped in bubble tape to protect themselves. Or better yet...just get something like this for all four kids...

We'll obviously need a bigger house if they're going to be riding around in bubbles.

In all seriousness though...I'm THAT mom who doesn't want her kids skiing or snowboarding, motorcycling, etc...as I'm pretty sure people die doing stuff like that...but Chris of course has always countered those thoughts with the idea that we're going to have to let them try new things...yesterday's incident just goes to show that it's possible for them to hurt themselves even if I were to lock them in the house all day.

These are the parts that suck about being a parent though...as I was laying in bed last night, I was questioning why I wanted 4-5 kids in the first place...its always seemed like a good idea but now it was occurring to me that I was going to have to go through these types of things with not only two children but 4 or 5...and last night, I wasn't sure if my heart could handle that...because I'm honestly convinced at this point that my kids hearts are pretty much tethered tightly to my own. Now that it's a new morning, I'm on board with the fact that, at the very most, her toenail is going to fall off as the new grows out...but last night, I was a mess with the idea that something this horrible had happened to my child. When you're sitting there with a kid who is screaming at the top of her lungs because they were hurting her (when they were giving her shots to numb her toe), it kind of seems like the end of your world. I felt sick and couldn't help but cry right along with her. And of course, there's the part about keeping it together. MY mom was always the one who was supposed to keep it together...when did it become MY turn to keep it together? I personally felt pretty distraught yesterday as the whole thing was going on but apparently, in the eyes of Ayris, I must've been pretty stoic. She asked why Grandma Sooner and Daddy both said "Oh my gosh!" when they heard about her toe (unfortunately both Chris and my mom called while we were driving to the hospital and that stupid car function that makes my phone go through the entire car made Ayris aware of their reactions)...apparently, I never seemed scared to Ayris...I just kept reassuring her that everything was going to be okay and that her toe wasn't as bad as it looked (it totally was nasty looking but she was FREAKING out so I didn't know any other way to calm her down)...none the less, it's nice knowing that even though I personally felt like I was falling apart, Ayris must've thought I was fine.

But again, today is a new day and Ayris is enjoying it. She was served breakfast in bed and thought that was pretty cool in and of itself...I also made her favorites for lunch...hard boiled eggs and jello...and I told her she could pick dinner (She chose KFC because she wants chicken, mashed potatoes and macaroni)...and all day she gets to pick movies that we are watching as a family in her room so she can keep her foot elevated (she could probably walk around but I personally would prefer her not until we change her dressing tonight and see what her toe looks like...it continued bleeding all through her dressing last night and that was 5+ hours after she dropped the rock on it).

I must admit I am feeling guilty for never thinking about devoting a day to each kid before...instead of waiting for something crappy like this to happen...after seeing how much enjoyment Ayris is getting out of it though, I think I may try to make this a weekly thing...maybe make Fridays a kids day...and go every other for each kid...so next Friday would be Asher's day and Ayris' the following, etc...

In some less depressing news, the other day when we were in the car, Ayris just told me out of the blue that when she was a baby in my tummy, she knew she wanted to pick good parents to love her and now that she was out of my tummy, she was glad she had us as her parents. Isn't that so sweet? Of course, this was all before the toe thing! But it's those random comments like that that make the hard days all the more worth it.

Here are some of the pictures that I had gotten yesterday before everything went down...

I LOVE LOVE LOVE how vibrant this scarf is in these pictures...I'm using a trial basis of Lightroom for editing my pictures right now (in addition to the wonderful camera/lens that is allowing for these blurred backgrounds).