It Was All Worth It...

Yesterday's post all about my crazy day of scheduled, reschedule, re-rescheduled and re-re-reschedule showings has all paid off:

Our house sold!

Here's to the next ten days, a good inspection and buyers who don't exercise their option period!

Seriously?

Today started out with a phone call from Centralized Showing Service, the company that schedules home showings in San Antonio. Our house was scheduled to be shown between 9:15 and 10:15.

So I raced around, cleaning, vaccuming and mopping, only to get a call at 9:10 that said, "The Realtor would like to reschedule from 5:30 to 6:30 tonight."

Fabulous. Okay, fine. Whatever. I'll hold off on the rest of the cleaning until this afternoon.

11:00 came the phone call, "The Realtor would like to re-reschedule for tomorrow morning between 9:30 and 10:30.

Grrrrrrr. FINE. I'll clean tonight and shuttle the kids out the door first thing in the morning.

At 1:00 the phone rang again.

"The Realtor would like to re-re-reschedule for today between 3:00 and 4:00."

Okay, that is IT.

I okayed the showing, but I flat-out refuse to leave this house. The girls haven't been feeling well for two days now (Grace had a 102.3 fever!) and Devin woke up with a horrible cough this morning. There is no way am waking up my kids just to leave for ten minutes.

Please pray this house sells soon.

A Mystery Solved?

I think we may have solved the mystery of Grace's strange finger injury. But before I get into that, I'll update on the injury itself.

Luckily, we've got a real trooper on our hands. Todd and I both held our collective breath as we had to keep Gracie's right hand (her dominant hand) clean and dry until the stitches dissolved. Neither one of us quite knew just how this was going to happen.

It seemed, though, either through her own trepidation or the Grace of God (or both), Gracie has learned to use her left hand a lot. She eats with it and picks things up with it and has really favored her right hand, allowing the wound to heal nicely.

The stitches completely dissolved earlier this week, so we took the bandages off and started letting her bathe again without a baggie over her hand (believe it or not, she even held her hand out of the water during bath time!). For the first time, I really took a look at the scar. I'm not usually squeamish about this kind of stuff -- as a mom, you just can't be. But this one hit me right in the heart and I couldn't really bring myself to look directly at the wound.

But I've taken a closer look at it now and it's pretty amazing, really. The cut goes a good two-thirds of the way around her right ring finger and is obviously very deep. It won't be a scar that will ever completely fade, though her young age does lend itself to a pretty complete healing. For now, we call her Frankenbaby.

I worry a little about how much she's still favoring it, though. Today, for example, she was getting herself to a standing position from sitting on the floor. As she leaned forward to place her hands on the ground, she put her left hand down flat, but put her right hand down with her palm up, using her wrist to pull herself up. Hmmmmm...

Devin has his five-year-old appointment tomorrow, so I plan to ask the pediatrician if she wants to see Gracie or not. I suspect I know the answer to that.

Anyway, onto the point of my post...

Yesterday, the girls were playing together, babbling in their own little language. I'm usually able to pick up every third or fourth word and get the gist of their conversations. This particular exchange was about bites they had gotten. Faith pointed to the one that Grace had laid on her this past weekend. Grace pointed to the area where an ant bit her a few weeks ago. Faith then showed off the part of her heel where our herding dog, Zoe, had tried to get her to go a certain direction (by the way, before you call Child Protective Services on me, Zoe is very gentle and only herds the kids away from danger).

Then Gracie put up her injured finger, pointed to it with her left hand and said, "I bite!"

Well...I guess Todd's assessment was right. Grace must have fallen onto her own hand, with mouth open and, CRUNCH! Nearly bit off her own finger.

There's one for the family album, huh?

The Preferred Pacis

We are a pacifier household. When Devin was little (little-er, really), he had to have three pacifiers at a time -- one in his mouth and one in each hand. It took an act of God to get him to give them up.

But he did give them up, just in time for the twins to get addicted to them.

Luckily, they aren't nearly as dependent upon them as Devin was. They don't walk around all day with them in their mouths, they don't care to take them places with them and if they need one because of some injustice that's been done to them during the day, any paci will do in a pinch.

But bedtime is another story.

We have four pacifiers that will do at bedtime. And they are the only pacifiers that will do at bedtime. We call them "The Preferred Pacis."

They are just Gerber brand pacifiers, so you'd think they wouldn't be hard to find. But they aren't the NUK pacis, which are the most easily found. Instead, we somehow got hooked on the Gerber, soft-centered latex pacifiers.

Okay, no big deal, right? They're Gerber -- they can't be that hard to track down.

Wrong.

It seems that Gerber has discontinued making these pacifiers. They are still making the smaller sizes, but my girls won't have anything to do with those small ones. They have to be the larger sizes (6+ months) and these are the sizes that are no longer being produced.

I'm stressing about this. I can't imagine the girls' reaction if we ever lose all four preferred pacis. There will be a lot of sleepless nights on our hands.

I've sent a strongly worded email to Gerber, asking about getting my hands on some of these now-worth-their-weight-in-gold pacifiers. I've bid on a few on eBay ("Ewwwwwwwww!" I know, but I'm at my wit's end!) and even won one of the auctions in which I will be paying nearly $14.00 for two pacifiers.

Desperation has set in.

Despite completely different subject matter, I feel a lot like this:

Devin's Doozie - A Visual Journey

Tonight, Devin got himself ready for bed. He walked out of his room in the following get up:

Cars jammie bottoms
Space-themed jammie top
An Ace Bandage, wrapped around his lower left leg
Spider Man house slippers
One Spongebob Squarepants gardening glove

Unfortunately, he disrobed before I could grab my camera.

Giving the Finger

It's been awhile since my last post because life in our house has suddenly just gone off the deep end. I mean, I fall into bed every night and fall asleep in minutes, only to wake up eight hours later and run like a mad woman again until bed time. It's a cycle I just can't seem to break.

I'll recap about our 4th of July weekend a little later in this post, but first I need to write the post that goes along with today's title.

Today, Grace gave me the finger. Specifically, the tip of her finger.

This week, Kimberly, Todd's best friend's daughter, is here visiting and helping out with the twins. She loves the twins and makes my life fantastic when she visits. I look forward to her being here every time!

So this morning, Kimberly, Devin, Faith, Grace and I were in our living room. The kids were all playing and everything was normal.

Grace was walking along between the couch (where I was sitting) and the coffee table holding her little toy bongo drums.

All of the sudden, the poor thing took a spill after stepping on a toy truck. The bongo drums went flying and down went Gracie.

She, of course, began to cry and I, of course, picked her up. But when I did, I saw blood on her lips. My first thought was that she had cut her lip on a tooth. But when I got her onto my lap, I realized that she was pouring blood. Gushing it.

So I flew into the kitchen to set her on the counter and figure out where the red stuff was coming from. The mouth? A cut on her leg? Where the heck was origin of all of this???

And then I saw it. The tip of the ring finger on her right hand was dangling. It was almost off.

I shouted out my findings, a few expletives and declared that I needed to get her to the ER.

Kimberly, being the angel that she is, helped me get Grace in the car, got my purse for me and called Todd to let him know what happened.

Meanwhile, I drove like a crazy woman all the way to the hospital, with my hazards on and blaring my horn as I took illegal turns and sped around other cars. I was a woman on a mission.

I drove the car up to the porte corchere at the emergency room and pulled Gracie out of the back seat. I left the car there and hours later, realized that I had parked in such a way that others couldn't really get through the driveway. *Gulp* I hope no one else had an emergency today.

I hauled bottom into the ER screaming, "Help! My daughter nearly severed her finger!" At this point, both Grace and I were covered in blood.

We were taken back, assessed, and gotten to a doctor in a matter of minutes. The doctor took a look at the finger, wrapped it up and gave me the scoop.

"We're going to need to put her under to reattach this. When was the last time she had anything to eat?"

"8:30 this morning."

"We can't put her under until it's been six hours since she last ate, so we'll have to wait until 2:30 to do the procedure."

With that, Grace was given some Tylenol with Codeine and we were left to wait five hours for the "okay" to reattach the dangling digit.

So we killed time watching TV, alternately going to get stuff to eat (Todd had left work to join us at the ER) and trying to get Gracie to rest.

Right on cue, though, around 2:00, Grace was given a drug similar to Valium that made her loopy and relaxed her enough to allow the nurses to get the IV in her arm.

Once all of the pieces were in place, Gracie Too was given a sedative that knocked her out in seconds. 45 minutes later, she had two internal stitches, four external stitches and the hope that any nerve damage will heal with time due to her young age.

Our little one slowly woke up, demonstrated that she could drink fluids and keep them down and we were discharged. Now we just have to keep that finger clean and dry for two weeks. This is where I just laughed.

It's all pretty typical, really. Grace is just like Devin and Devin is always two steps away from the ER. It would only stand to reason that she, too, would end up at our local emergency room.

What's a major mystery is how her finger got involved.

Kimberly confirmed that while there was plenty of blood on the floor and kitchen counter, there was no blood on the toys. As we expected, the toy that was held/thrown and the one that was tripped over did not cause the gash.

The only thing we could come up with is that when Gracie fell forward, she caught herself on her hands and her front teeth hit one of her fingers upon impact. That would explain why she had blood on her mouth when I first picked her up.

So really, this is the utter definition of freak accident. "One in a million, Doc. One in a million."

I'd planned to blog about what else we've been up to, but I'm a little weary and am looking forward to the date I have with my latest novel. I'll blog more when I can. If that day ever arrives. :)

So this is