The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

The Good:

On Wednesday our church held a Christmas coffeehouse.  Matt played with the church's praise band, there was the traditional singing of the Christmas carols.  Grace ran around and played (and ate much sugar).  Once we were getting ready to leave and starting to pack up, Grace discovered the rug that had toys for the kids to play with.  There were puzzles and pipe cleaners with pony beads.  She was instantly drawn to the colorful beads and with a little help from a sweet child in our neighborhood (she tied off the end so the beads would not slip off) Grace strung up a whole pipe cleaner with beads all by herself.

I was very amazed.  I did not think that she had the attention or the fine motor skill to do that kind of work.  I guess I was wrong, and I guess I need to get some beads for our house since she still seems to love putting them on and taking them off (we took her string of beads home and she has continued to play with them each day).

    
 The Bad:
On Friday morning Grace was playing in the house and I was trying to start to wash dishes.  Before long all I heard was a frantic cry.  Grace was standing by a chair with her back toward me.  So I scooped her up and tried to cuddle and comfort her as much as I could.  I did not know what was going on at this moment but I thought it best to get her calm before assessing the situation.  When she would not calm down any after about 30 seconds to minute of cuddling I decided that something was really wrong so I pulled her away from my shoulder and looked at her face.

At this moment my breath was taken from me, because all I could see was blood streaming down her face from area around both her eyes.  So I ran to grab a tissue and start blotting at the blood to see where the injury was.  I breathed a bit easier when I realized that she had two cuts under her eyes and that her eyes were not the injured objects.  But the cuts did not look nice at all.

Frantically I called Matt at work and asked him what I should do.  I took a picture with my cell phone and sent it to him e-mail so that he could help me while knowing a bit more about the situation.  He agreed that we should see a doctor.  So he called the pediatrician and got us an appointment at 2 pm, or if we could leave right now they could see us right away.  I left the lights on at the house, I grabbed her shoes (I did not even put them on her feet), I flew out of the house as fast as I could.

We got to the office and they saw us right away.

 

This is the picture that I sent Matt while at work.  Not pretty (and it does not help that she was in middle of a blink when I took the picture).  So Matt got the picture and put it up on his computer screen to look at it.  A man who sits near Matt saw the picture and heard some of the  phone calls and asked what was going on.  Matt explained that Grace had an accident.  His co-worker responded "And why are you still here?"

Matt thought about it and agreed.  He got to the pediatrician's office just as we were starting to meet with the nurse practitioner.  It was so good to see him, and have him help me with caring for Grace at that time.

The Ugly:

So the nurse practitioner glued Grace's cuts shut.  Yes, glue.  On some injuries they still do stitches or staples, but on a lot of injuries that are not too bad (but bad enough) they use a special kind of super glue that is made for this.  She said that we should wait a week till the glue comes off then start putting on some non scaring cream (though she does not think that it will scar much anyway, but with the location we should not take our chances).

So now we have a beautiful little girl who looks like she is practicing to be a football player.  And many bruises to look forward to.  All of her Christmas pictures, 2 year old pictures, and new family of 4 pictures are going to show the events of this day.

However, when I look at her and all of her glued, scabbed mess I am so thankful to God that the injuries were as minor as they were.