What a trip

Well we've had a very interesting last few days.

I am typing this email from a computer in Shriner's Hospital. Eden is walking around the playroom with Bryan, happily hugging him and listening to him bang on a drum. Her head is wrapped in gauze like a little helmet and her hands are covered by gauze and hospital socks to the elbow.

It all started Thursday morning. I was headed to work, and I was one subway stop away. I got a call from Bryan, so I answered the phone. All I could hear was Eden screaming and Bryan sobbing uncontrollably and asking, "What do I do?" I jumped off the train just before the doors closed, ran above ground, and searched desperately for a cab while I tried to get him to calm down enough to tell me what had happened. Eden burned herself on the glass of our gas fireplace. Bryan had turned it on because it was chilly in the morning, and had forgotten about it. (It was the first time in several months we'd had it on). He sat her down and went to the bathroom. Mere seconds later she was sitting in front of the fire staring at her burned hands and arms in shock and he was on the phone with me, holding her in the cold shower and trying to calm down enough to figure out what to do.

He called 911 and I got home in the cab just minutes after the ambulance got there. It was the most terrible cab ride I'd ever experienced, not quite knowing what was happening. I rode with her to Children's Hospital and had to lay on top of her while they tried to put in an IV. As soon as they got it in I passed out. Bryan had followed us in our car (our pastor lives just down the street and drove him) and he got there right after they'd put me in the bed next to Eden.

I was totally fine, just in shock at seeing my baby's palms all white and leathery and her forearms peeling away, and knowing she was screaming from pain and there was nothing I could do - I couldn't even hold her.

Eden, on the other hand, was badly burned. They immediately transferred us here (it is a pediatric burn hospital). It was several hours before they had her calm and her wounds dressed, and I finally got to hold my little girl.

She has very deep what used to be called second degree burns on her hands, forearms, and forehead. She is going into surgery at some point tomorrow for grafting.

I still can't really believe this is happening. Just a few days ago I was on my way to work, just thinking about all of the things I needed to get done before the weekend. Now here I am at a hospital computer, trying to hold it together for my little family's sake, and my little girls' chubby palms will never, ever look the same.

There is so much in my head, so much I could say about this whole ordeal. But for now I'll leave it at a positive. I am so thankful for the people who are getting us through this. Our community here has been so amazing. Even the nurses have mentioned how loved Eden must be. We have had multiple visitors every day. I remember 1L year mourning the fact that all of our good friends lived so far away. While many of our good friends, and all of our family, are still far away, we feel so enveloped in love right now it's honestly amazing.

God has been faithful in this. I have had moments, I admit, when I think "Why? Why is this happening to my baby girl?" and then I know that while there is an answer to that question, I don't know it, and that is ok. Because He knit her together in my womb, and He is working all things together for her good. And we serve Him (not the other way around).

It's hard to see my baby so hurt, but we're doing OK, and He is bringing much-needed peace.

If you're praying for us, here are some specific things you can pray for:

1. Wisdom for the surgeons tomorrow
2. Comfort and peace surpassing understanding for Eden
   
3. Peace for Bryan - the images of the day are already haunting him, and he feels responsible. I know I would feel the same way, but I am trying to help him see that it's not his fault.
4. Rest for all three of us tonight; tomorrow is going to be a long day
5. That God would continue to pull us together as a family unit

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers, and I apologize for the stream-of-consciousness. I just needed to get it out there, hopefully I can be more coherent later.

The No-'Poo Challenge (Part TWO)

Since so many of you have asked for MORE DETAILS! for The No-'Poo Challenge, I thought I'd post a separate post about the nitty gritty (um... no pun intended?). If I had time I'd put together a whole Tutorial Tuesday-ish post on this but since I need to be packing (going CAMPING this weekend!! YAY!!) I will have to make it text-only and short.

Baking soda: I keep a small container in the shower of baking soda. I usually use about a tablespoon or so in the palm of my hand and mix just enough water to make a paste. Then I smooth it on the crown of my head, and sometimes let it sit for a bit before I rinse. The amount is hard to get exactly right; you have to play with it until it's not soo much that it dries out your hair and not too little so that it's ineffective. But I think better to err on the too little side when you're figuring it out.

Vinegar: OK. First, be sure to use apple cider vinegar. Second, dilute it a lot. I put about a tablespoon or so into a squirt bottle and fill the rest up with water. If you use too much the smell won't wear off! It's not terrible but it's definitely vinegar-y!

Friction: Scrub, scrub, scrub your scalp. Bryan has a scalp massager thing that he bought at the barber shop and I sometimes use it. The point is to stimulate your scalp, and also to make sure you're rinsing well all the way to the base of the hair.

One final sell: I've heard (from a few different sources) that people with thick, curly hair can really benefit from this. I don't understand either of those adjectives as they relate to hair so I cannot attest, but I've heard that it can make curly hair more manageable. Not sure why. Just reporting.

Everything else is normal: You should still blow dry, straighten, etc. as usual (though, as I mentioned before, I don't use product in my hair anymore, primarily because I don't have to). My point here is that everything else about your hair routine should be just the same, though in the early days it might get a little dicey. Trust me, it gets better. (And yes, Mrs. Douglas, you can keep shaving. In fact, please do. :))

GOOD LUCK! Let me know how it goes!

The No-'Poo Challenge

So... I stopped shampooing my hair in May.

There - I said it. My amazing hairdresser once told me I didn't have to shampoo my hair every day (or at all), and that in fact shampooing it and removing the natural oils makes the scalp overproduce oil and actually makes the hair look even more greasy. And then my friend Susan stopped shampooing completely and her hair still looked great, so I gave it a shot.

My goal was to make it 10 days with no shampoo. This does not mean I didn't wash my hair - I used water and friction to scrub it. I also stopped using products so that I wouldn't have a huge buildup to worry about.

I made it to about a week and I had to do something. It was getting pretty nasty (and I'm, like, a professional and all...). So I did a little research, and tried a baking soda paste on the crown and an apple cider vinegar rinse afterward.

It was awesome. My fine, thin, very straight, flat hair all of a sudden had volume! It was crazy! And the baking soda somehow absorbed the oil without making my scalp freak out. I don't know how!

I ended up going two full months without any shampoo. And then I decided to try it again just so I could have a comparison. The shampooed hair was definitely sleeker and smoother, and silkier. I did miss that. But it was incredibly flat. And for a girl who's had trouble with volume her whole life, this was a major downer. Knowing that my hair can actually look like it's not plastered to my head, without any product, without any worrying, and in fact without even shampooing, made it impossible to go back to shampoo every day.

Ultimately I have settled in a sort of compromise. I have started using baking soda/vinegar once a week, and shampooing about every 7-10 days, or whenever I feel like I want the "sleek" look. But I certainly do not shampoo as often as I used to, and my hair is none the worse for it. I don't think it looks greasy or dirty at all; in fact I think it feels healthier and stronger.

SO: I challenge you, brave soul, to consider the No-'Poo challenge! Give it a try. Set a goal - 10 days with no shampoo. Feel free to use the baking soda/vinegar combo, but seriously give it at least 5-6 days of just water and friction. It takes some getting used to but your hair will love you. Let me know how it goes!!

Toddling!

After the first couple of steps, Eden decided she wasn't ready to walk anymore.

Last night, she changed her mind!

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!

One Whole Year

Sweet Eden,

I can distinctly remember the very first time I kissed your tiny, pink, puffy cheek. You felt so little and so big at the same time, and I felt incredibly excited and very anxious when they handed you to me. I remember staring at your little face and trying to take it in, to memorize it as quickly as I could. I remember thinking that just a few moments before, when you were still inside me, you were familiar, and now you were completely new and unknown.

One year later I kiss that sweet cheek every day. And even better than that, I know you. I can close my eyes and see your face, hear your infectious giggle. I can feel your beautiful little marshmallow cheeks on my lips. You know me, too. One of my favorite parts of the day is coming up the stairs and hearing your palms slap the hardwood as you thunder to the gate, squealing with excitement, to meet me.

You have changed so much in a year! And though I was sure that when we reached this place I would be sad, mourning the loss of your babyhood, the truth is I'm not, really. I loved the cuddily bundle of milky sleep you were a year ago, but it just keeps getting better! How can I be sad when you're so much fun?

Your first birthday party was so much fun. You were surrounded by many, many people who love you very much, and I am assured that there were many, many more wishing they could be there, from all over the country. I made a strawberry layer cake with strawberry cream cheese frosting and I made you a mini version of the same thing. You did so great! You picked off the strawberries first, and then started to shove the cake in your mouth just like you were supposed to! You were a little freaked out by having thirty pairs of eyes watch you, I think, but you seemed to like the cake! You made a big mess on your hands and face and high chair tray, but not a drop got in your hair, on your dress, or on the floor! That's my girl!!


The list of things you can do keeps getting longer and longer, and I'm often awestruck that every one of them was learned. From holding your head up to re-arranging furniture, you figured it out one step at a time. And now you can give kisses to your stuffed animals, give high fives (thanks to Aunt Kelli), clap, point, attempt to put on shoes, brush your hair, and pick out the toy duck, among other things.

You say "No," "duck," and "da-da," and Daddy told me the other day you said "mama" but I haven't had the benefit of hearing that one yet (even though it is the one word I've been longing to hear from those sweet little lips since forever).

You aren't yet walking on your own, but we know it is coming very soon. Daddy and I take you for "walks" around the apartment every day, your little fists clenched around our fingers.

You have always transitioned effortlessly, requiring at most mere suggestion on the part of your parents. You have transitioned completely to whole cow's milk, without complaint. And last week we put away your bottles - you're all sippy cup now. The latest change was to one nap - now you sleep from 8-8:30pm to at least 7:30 (sometimes as late as 9!) am, and then you nap at 1:00 for a couple of hours. Daddy loves the new schedule but I admit I miss our morning cuddles when I don't get them!!

It seems like at one, maybe more noticably than at other stages, you're full of rapid, very visible change. You are truly leaving your babyhood behind you. Daddy and I love you just how you are, and we can't wait to see what's next!!

Love,

Mommy