{pretty, happy, funny, real}

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

~ pretty ~

Fresh whole wheat soaked bread... it rises so well!
I have been mostly avoiding wheat and most grains in an effort to lose weight.  After about two weeks of being wheat-free, I made this bread and had a couple slices, slathered in Kerrygold butter - yum, yum, yum!  Soaking the wheat supposedly makes the wheat easier to digest and the nutrients more readily absorbed... but I don't think it makes the bread cause less weight gain, ha!

~ happy ~

These happy little guys add a bit of brightness to my kitchen.  They were only a dollar each at the craft store, and I love them above my sink!

~ funny ~

This one is also happy, because I love hanging out with my brothers.  It is funny because Mike fell asleep on the right there... before anyone else was back at the hotel room and could take a photo of the three of us.  I was visiting their hotel room and watching Pawn Stars with them until our parents got there and took the picture for me.  Also funny was how Mike convinced Tim that they could share this huge king sized hotel bed that night so that he wouldn't have to sleep on the fold-out couch in my family's hotel room.  Tim tried to appeal to Mike's wife, Crystal, over the phone (she was not here) by asking her if she would share a bed with her brother.  When she said, "No, but that's because he's a boy," Tim responded with, "Well, so is Mike!"  Ha!  But even if he hadn't been able to convince Tim, it looks like it would have been useless anyway, since Mike didn't even remember falling asleep here or anything else until he woke up in the morning... he's just like our dad...

Ahh, the joys of a large family... and to think that my parents, all my brothers, and I used to share a basic two-bed hotel room when traveling.

~ real ~

Not only did we get to make our first trip to the ER for an injured child, but it happened on a Sunday while we were 550 miles from home!  Lucy fell and split her lip - it was so deep that it was gaping and looked like a big chunk of lip had been torn out (I know, I know, it makes me cringe, too).  After going to the closed urgent care that would accept our insurance, we went to their open location, only to be told that they can't do anything when there's a gaping hole in the lip, only if it is just a cut.  They sent us to All Children's Hospital downtown.

 

 Apparently this was the clearest photo we got... lucky you for being spared the gore.  This does not do the injury justice, ha ha.  This is out of focus and also was taken several hours after the injury... it happened just after noon, and it was finally being stitched up at 3:30.  This photo was taken sometime between 2 and 3, after it had started trying to heal itself...  If you looked at her from the side, you could see the edge of the cut sticking way out... just like there was a wedge-shaped piece of her lip missing.  I was convinced that part of it was missing, but the doc was positive that it was just a deep split because it still lined up perfectly when the gap was closed. 

 

Poor thing, she looked dazed like this the whole time we sat waiting for the doctor!  She is never as quiet as she was then... First, she nursed for about two hours straight following the injury.  I will let you use your imagination as to how that happened while we drove around trying to find care for the injury!  Breastmilk in the cut and then just to soothe her... thank goodness for toddler nursing.  It would have been hell trying to soothe her any other way!  Once she started nursing, she stopped screaming - it truly was amazing.

 

After holding a q-tip of numbing solution in the gaping part of the wound for a half hour (was supposed to be ten minutes but we overheard that a toddler who got stomped by a horse had just come in; obviously much more pressing than a lip injury, and made us feel blessed and grateful to be there with something so relatively minor!)... the nurse wrapped Lucy up in a sheet to keep her totally still.  This was the worst part.  She hated it.  I am sure she'll have nightmares of that doctor leaning over her face while she was immobilized!  I leaned over her too and talked to her, and he had to put in four stitches - two in the lip itself, and two more right at the bottom where the lip and skin meet and the cut was horizontal (it was basically shaped like a capital L, with several smaller scrapes and minor cuts alongside it).  The doc was confident (almost too confident, in an "I'm awesome" kind of way, ha ha) that there would be no scar and that he had gotten the first stitch in perfectly, which would make sure the lip lined up along the bottom edge when it healed.

These pictures were taken with Daddy after the stitches were done.  I had to use the bathroom while we waited for the discharge papers, and Lucy was not happy at all that I was going to leave her while I went.  Daddy got her to calm down by taking photos together with his phone!  The owl patterned material you see there is a pillow made by some grandmothers for the hospital.  They used it to elevate and stabilize her head while putting in the stitches, and then she got to keep it!  Now she sleeps with it!

I have never seen stitches being put in before, and it was actually very interesting.  Knowing that her lip was numb made it easy for me to watch a needle going through her lip.  I didn't even know that a lip could be stitched before this!

And in case you are wondering just what could make so terrible of a lip injury:

This is the surface where she fell face-first.  It is a hard plastic surface on the basketball/volleyball court at our hotel.  It is not rubbery at all - it is hard, hard plastic, with sharp 90 degree angles on those crosshatch pieces.  My Uncle Paul kept asking if there was some kind of liability on the hotel's part, and he even came over to look at this surface himself!  I will say that it is a pretty unwise surface for a place where people might be falling as they play volleyball or basketball (and Lucy was just walking around on it!) - I bet it would tear up a knee or elbow pretty badly, too!  I was in my parents' hotel room when she fell, and a couple housekeepers heard her crying and followed Chris back to our room to see if they could help.  When he couldn't get me on my cell phone (bad coverage in the hotel rooms), he told the housekeeping lady to call my parents' room.  I happened to answer, and between the distant-sounding landline, the lady's slight accent, and the sound of a baby crying in the background, I had a hard time understanding her.  I finally said, "I can't really understand you - there's a baby crying loudly in the background!"  And then I was able to make out, "Yes, she's hurt!" and I said, "Wait - is that MY baby crying??"  When she said yes, I hung up and ran to our room!

All's well that ends well, though.  It happened on Sunday, and she appears to be healing up decently.  Amazingly, she slept well the next two nights at the hotel, and she never once said that her lip hurt!  The few times I asked her, she said, "No, it all better!"  Tough stuff, that one!