Every time I go through the drive-thru at the bank, they see the girls in the backseat and ask if I want suckers for them. And every time I say, "no". I tell myself it's because suckers are so unhealthy, but really it's because I don't want to deal with the mess and sticky fingers and sticky carseats. But earlier this week, I found myself saying "yes" for some reason. I made them wait until we got home to eat them so I didn't have to deal with the sticky carseat part (and also they had to eat them outside - don't I sound like such fun mom?), and Ila was happier than a pig in a ditch.
I think it might have been the first time she's ever had a sucker!
So I took pictures of her the whole time she ate it because she was so cute!
That was on Monday.
And it's actually painful for me to look at these pictures now and see how happy she was, because on Tuesday, she had her first serious injury, and she hasn't had a lot of happy moments since.
Something I always let Eden do when she was younger and now I've let Ila take over, is load the dishwasher detergent pod into the dishwasher. Starting when Eden was about Ila's age, I gave her little chores to do around the house, and that was one of them. She loaded the pod, closed the lid, shut the door, and turned on the dishwasher. Now Ila does it for me.
On Tuesday afternoon, after I loaded the dishwasher, Ila got a detergent pod out for me and put it in the dishwasher. Apparently the one she picked up was leaking, and she got soap on her hand. Then she wiped her eye. She started crying and pointing to her eye. I glanced down at the pod sitting in the dishwasher, saw that it was leaking a tiny bit, and realized that she got soap in her eye. I got a wet washcloth and cleaned and wiped her eye. After I did that, she was completely fine. Her eye was a little bit red for a while, but she ran around and played the rest of the day and never once complained about her eye hurting. By the time she went to bed, I had forgotten all about the incident.
Around 2 am on Wednesday morning, she woke up absolutely screaming bloody murder. I ran into her room. She was so hysterical that she couldn't tell me what was wrong, but she was laying in bed holding her tummy, so I thought her stomach was hurting her. Her eye was the furthest thing from my mind. It didn't even dawn on me that her screaming might be related to her eye because she had been so fine for hours after getting the soap in it. Eventually she fell back asleep, and I crawled into bed with her just in case she started feeling bad again. Sure enough, she woke up screaming a little while later, and for the next five hours she alternated between screaming and falling back into a restless sleep. And every time I thought it was something related to her stomach because of how she was holding it the first time she woke up crying. Around 6:30, when it was time for Dustin to get up, I took Ila to him, and the two of us tried to figure out what was wrong with her. We tried asking her over and over again to show us where it hurt, but she was so upset that she wouldn't do it and wouldn't respond to our questions.
After a while, Dustin commented on the fact that she wasn't opening her eyes. I had thought nothing of it... between her being in pain, crying, super tired from hardly sleeping, and the fact that now all of a sudden she had been brought into a bright room from her dark one, it didn't seem weird to me that her eyes were closed.
But after Dustin mentioned it, we realized that she COULDN'T open her eyes! The previous afternoon and her getting detergent soap in her eyes came rushing back at me, and I FLIPPED OUT!
I threw Eden's school clothes on her, dumped some blueberries in a bowl for her to eat in the car, put Ila in her carseat (still in her pajamas), and headed to drop Eden at school and then take Ila to the ER (while still in MY pajamas, hair uncombed, teeth unbrushed, etc.).
It's an hour drive from our house to the ER, and I cried the entire time. I cried to the teacher that got Eden out of the car at school. I called my mom to cry. I called a friend to cry. I was on the phone crying to Dustin on and off during that time. (He attempted to come with me, but he also had to be in Austin that day, so I convinced him that I could handle it on my own.) But actually I couldn't handle it on my own because I was seriously panicking that she was going to be BLIND or something because of this. So my grandma (who lives only a few minutes from the hospital) met me at the ER door. And when I said to Ila, "Gigi is here", Ila opened her eyes for the very first time. It lasted about .5 seconds before she closed them and started crying again, but I did think that it was the sweetest thing that she opened her eyes to see my grandma when Dustin and I couldn't get her to open her eyes for anything!
In the end, they irrigated her eye with saline. They wrapped her tiny body up in a sheet so that she couldn't fight them, and it took THREE people to hold her down, pry her eye open, and flush it out. And oh did she scream and cry and scream. And oh did I cry and cry and cry listening to it. But they assured me that she, and her eye, were going to be okay.
As soon as I put her back in her carseat, she fell asleep, and I thought that once she woke up, she would be okay. But that has not been the case. Her eye is slowly healing and getting better, but she is still not back to normal. When we got back home on Wednesday, she spent the rest of the day crying or screaming or sleeping. Cry, scream, fall asleep. Wake and repeat. I slept with her that night, and she woke up feeling much better on Thursday morning. But around lunchtime, she went down, down, down, and was back to crying the rest of the day. I slept with her again last night, and she whimpered in her sleep all night.
precious thing sleeping in my bed yesterday
Which brings us to today, Friday.
Back in October for Ila's birthday, my brother and his wife bought her tickets to see Sesame Street Live. Ila is OBSESSED with Elmo. The show was this morning, and it's just what she needed after her no good terrible very bad week.
Her eye is still red and swollen, and she's not all the way back to being her happy, bubbly self, but Elmo made her smile and giggle and laugh for the first time since this all happened. You could tell that she still doesn't feel 100%, and she spent the majority of the show with her head leaned back on Dustin's chest, but it gave her something to enjoy. She kept looking at me and smiling and pointing to the stage, like, "Look Mom, it's Elmo! Do you see Elmo?!"
Ila sitting on Dustin's lap
That wimpy ass balloon cost TEN DOLLARS! But when your two year who hasn't smiled in three days wants it, you fork over the money.
My brother also got us tickets to do the meet-n-greet. Now as much as Ila LOVES Elmo, and oh my goodness does she LOVE him... (We watch the show, have an Elmo sippy cup, an Elmo toothbrush, Elmo bubble bath, multiple toy Elmos that all have various jobs - one to sleep with, one to sit in her carseat with, etc)... when it came time to see the "real" Elmo...
Hahaha. Poor girl. I'd say the morning was still a huge success though. On the way home, she was smiling and laughing and talking about her Elmo experience like her old self!
notice the Elmo cup and stuffed Elmo on her lap :)
She has an eye patch that she wears occasionally (Eden calls her a pirate), but every time I ask if I can take a picture of her with it on, she starts to cry.
I have felt so unbelievably guilty. I've had so many moms share with me the freak accidents that they've had with their kids, but it doesn't help - when it's your kid, you feel awful. Dustin has never liked that I let the girls mess with those pods, but I was always all, "Oh, it's fine! I'm RIGHT HERE! I supervise them the entire time, so it's not like they're going to put it in their mouth or something! Besides, they like doing it!" I never imagined that something like this would happen. So Dustin was pretty mad at me. He was also pretty upset when he found out that my way of handling her getting the soap in her eye was just to wipe it with a wet washcloth. But I honestly didn't know it was that powerful and strong and horrible. She didn't even get THAT MUCH in her eye! I saw the leaky pod, and it was still full! I still used it to wash the dishes with! And that's what I cried to my mom and friend on the phone over and over on the way to the ER. "I didn't know it was so bad!!! She seemed fine!!!"
She's a little bit better every day though, and I can't wait until she's back to this:
