On a lighter note

Does anybody recognize this big girl??


She may have a baby mullet, but those are some adorable little curly pigtails, if I do say so myself...

Just another Sunday afternoon...

At church on Sunday, a woman who's about to have a baby asked when we could get together to talk about being a working mom, etc. I thought about it, and told her that Sunday afternoons are probably best - they're the most predictable time of my week. Bryan's always working, and Eden and I are almost always home.

I shouldn't have said anything.

As usual, on the way home from church, Eden fell asleep in the car. As usual, I put her in her bed, snoring away. Very UN-usually, she woke up crying, wheezing and rattling really terribly, struggling to breathe, and burning hot. I immediately called Bryan and told him to come home RIGHT NOW, I was calling the doctor. I called the doc, and was told to take her to the ER immediately. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200. And take someone with you so that you can sit in the backseat with her. If anything changes, pull over and call 911.

As you can imagine, I was completely terrified, and barely holding it together at this point, clinging to Eden, who was also completely terrified and barely holding it together.

Bryan made it home in record time and we rushed to the ER. We only had to wait a few minutes before they took us back to triage, where we learned that Eden had a 103 degree fever and a very hoarse voice. We'd barely made it back to the waiting room before they called us back to a room. A blur of people came in and out, and listened to her and poked and prodded her, and somehow over her screaming and wheezing I heard "croup." (This was actually relieving to me, because while I didn't know exactly what croup was, I knew I'd heard of it, friends' kids had had it, and it was really treatable).

Next thing we know, there's a respiratory therapist in the room, holding a nebulizer tube in front of her face and she's still crying it out. After that treatment she fell asleep in my arms (which she never does anymore) and slept for 2 hours while we gave her some cool mist treatment.

She woke up happy, but still a little bit wheezy. They gave her an oral steroid, and discharged us.

Long story (sort of) short, we ended up almost going back to the ER Sunday night, but she relaxed and fell asleep so we just put her in our bed so we could keep an ear on her. None of us slept very well. We took her to the doctor's office yesterday, and they gave her a prescription for more steroids. Today I'm home with her, and she still sounds really wheezy, but definitely not as bad as Sunday afternoon.

That might have been the most frightening experience of my life so far. Knowing that she was struggling and there was nothing I could do but hold her was absolutely terrible. And not knowing what was wrong, not knowing what to do, was maybe worse. Bryan and I kept saying over and over, "Parenting is so hard!" We just wanted someone to tell us what to do, how to make her better. We wanted to make the hurt go away, right away. And that was just croup. I can't imagine dealing with something worse - and I don't want to try.

Big Development

So, in my memory-hazed state I forgot to mention that we're looking forward to mobility in our household.

Eden took 2 steps today!

She was standing (she's an expert stander now, and can even stoop down and stand back up; she practices this particular move quite often) in the living room, holding onto a wooden ball (part of a new toy we got her today at Ben Franklin) and she was trying to hand it to one of us. We, being the sly parents we are, scooted away from her just enough so that she couldn't reach us. She took one tiny little step, and then another, and then sat down.

And then many, many kisses were showered on our sweet little girl.

Memory Lane

I was just looking through some old pictures of Eden for her scrapbook* when I came across this picture from last year's Independence Day party - I had forgotten all about it:

Eden looks a little bit out of it (and probably was - all three of us were at this point, she was 2 weeks old), but it made me get all teary-eyed thinking about J&C and little Soren, and how much has changed in the past couple of years. We've shared a whole lot of life together in the just-under-two-years we've known each other, and this picture just made me realize that. And now they've moved away.

It's hard to put down roots in a place where everyone is transient. People come for a season, as our pastor says, and then move on with their lives. It's refreshing to always have new faces, I suppose, but it's also so, so sad to see such great friends leave (and that is only a sampling!!). I suppose the good part of is, we now have friends all over the country! And now, thanks to these special people, if we ever drive home again, we'll have somewhere to stay near the halfway point! But it's really hard to know that this is probably the nature of our life here. There are a few people who plan to stay forever (we're starting a club, actually) but we're a pretty rare breed.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that moment of bittersweet, especially given the fact that I just posted a July 4 picture of these two.

* I'm really not a scrapbooker, but Ruthless is, and she was kind enough to make Eden an "all-you-have-to-do-is-insert-photos" book as a baby gift.

Happy 4th!

This day has been awesome - we didn't host a barbecue this year (as we did last year) but we headed out to one in Medford at the home of one of our small group members' apartment. It was a neat mix of people we knew and people we didn't know, and Eden was very patriotic, rockin' a cute little red jumper and some sweet shades:


We got to hang out with Jeremy and Carol and Soren, who are leaving next week for Indy... Here's Eden lovin' on her buddy:


We hung out there for a couple of hours before Eden got a little warm and tired (Boston finally realized it was SUMMER!) and we took her home, gave her a quick bath to cool her down, and she headed down for a quick nap before dinner. When she woke up, she had dinner and then the three of us were playing in her room, and guess what happened? She STOOD UP!! ALL BY HERSELF!!* (Sorry, we didn't get a picture of that one...) She was leaning toward me, sitting down, and then she just decided to stand, and she slowly got there. I scooted away and she just stood there grinning, holding a toy!!

We then commenced squealing with excitement (which seems to be what we do with milestones), and she smiled really big and kept on standing. Then she slooooowly crouched down to sitting, and we commenced kisses and snuggling (which is what we do all the time...). Then we spent the next half hour trying to get her to stand up again, or walk. Of course she didn't but we were excited so we didn't really care!!

She went happily off to bed, and now I'm taking some time to blog (finally!) and sipping on a fuzzy navel while my husband watches some TV - ahhh, relaxation. Later we'll watch the fireworks and hit the hay in preparation for our usual crazy Sunday!

Happy Independence Day!!!

*This was particularly funny to me because I had just this morning read Lag Liv's post about her weekend and noted that Landon had done the same thing on the 4th last year (well, technically, the 5th, but close enough)! Must be something about Independence Day, I guess!