The other day I laughed at how crazy life is. Here I am in one stage of parenting, while my other friends were at various stages of theirs- from first steps to actually giving birth at that very moment. Life is indeed crazy.
What I didn’t know was that just 2 days later, life would show just HOW crazy it can be. How incredibly fast life can change. How I could go from having Kennedy dancing on my feet to “Unchained Melody” in one moment and a mere few hours later, Abasi and I would be Skyping the Poison Control Center in the US about a possible toxic overdose for our daughter. Life is CRAZY.
Kennedy in bed and Abasi and I settling down to eat our dinner, we thought we had won a free pass to sleep town. She hadn’t napped during the day, she was easy to put into bed and now she was quiet. Obviously, too quiet. We heard a bump, looked into the room and saw Kennedy playing in her room, tube of previously almost full Salicylic Acid nearly empty in her hand. Looking around, we quickly saw it rubbed onto the floor, on some toys and in her hair, but with the tube being so empty… twisted as if to get that very last bit of cream out… we were clearly concerned with ingestion.
So we asked, “Kennedy, did you put this in your mouth?”
“Yes, I tasted it.”
“You put it in your mouth?”
“No, I tasted it.”
Well, that did nothing to ease our concern. Discussing with a two year old the difference between tasting and swallowing, especially when they can tell they MIGHT have done something wrong, gets you absolutely no where.
Fast forward through a blur of googling, Skyping the Poison Control (who were AMAZING), coming to the conclusion that though Salicylic Acid is essentially aspirin (which is why it’s dangerous for children), the amount she could have possibly ingested was PROBABLY not enough to be toxic, washing her and brushing her teeth, I found myself lying in bed with her, waiting for any kind of reaction. Never before has living so far from a hospital (an hour and change from a not-so-great-one and 4 HOURS from a great one) seemed so scary and suffocating. She did have 2 slight “symptoms” according to the various sights we read, but all in all seemed energetic and fine.
As she fell asleep, I put her face close to mine and said “I need you forever Kennedy. You can’t go anywhere.”
Her response? She put her tiny little hands on either side of my face and said “You’re beautiful Mommy.”
I pretty much just collapsed my face onto hers, needing to be close to her, hating myself for leaving that tube in reach and thanking God for allowing this to not have been as serious as it could have been.
Clearly, I slept with her that night. Well, more like I laid next to her as she slept, every twitch or cough she had I inspected until I felt sure she was ok. I woke/ got up at 6am when the sun was coming through the windows, checked her again, kissed her on her forehead and walked to the door to watch her still for another minute or two.
I checked on her another 2 times after that. Any sound I heard, I jumped out of bed. The next time I went into see her, she was laying in bed awake and laughing. Again, I fell into her bed and kissed her.
So many things can and DO happen in the blink of an eye, and this time we got away with it. I left something in reach and it could have been a lot worse. I could have made a mistake that I would never forgive myself for. As I’ve said before, I’m not perfect, but I’ll be damned if I don’t learn from my mistakes and appreciate the things that do go our way.
Clearly, alls well that ends well. We are back to the normal morning routine of coffee, juice, cartoons and her newest obsession of begging for chocolate. It was a wake up call, but in the end not serious. We were lucky. We ARE lucky.
Life is crazy.
Do You Have a Jungle Princess? 