What a week...

Well, we made it another week without someone reporting us to DSS (child protective services in MA). It was close...I really thought, more than once, that a 24 year old woman, straight out of college with no children of her own, might show up at my door to "observe" my parenting skills. If she had come her report would have read something like this, "Mother came to the door in her pajamas...it was 1:00 p.m. The house was filthy. The sink was overflowing with dishes, there were bits of fruit and pasta all over the kitchen floor. The smell of garbage and dirty diapers was strong. There seems to be plenty if food in the home, on the kitchen counter I observed three boxes of cereal, a bag of apples, a container of Nestlee Quick, a loaf of bread and a package of English muffins. The two children were reasonably clean. However, the baby was wearing only a diaper and the three year old boy was dressed in a filthy pajama top and underwear. The boy showed me his playroom. He has a lot of age appropriate toys. However there were a lot of small pieces that the baby could choke on scattered about the room. There were also several empty juice boxes on the floor and an entire package of goldfish ground into the rug. As I walked past the bathroom I noticed the distinct smell of urine."

Now I'll back up and tell you about our week. Last Sunday night we were all playing outside after dinner. Brad was holding Grace and I was in the yard with Sam. Suddenly Grace let out a horrible scream....I asked Brad what happened...the reply, "I dropped her". When I took her from him, she instantly got quiet, very quiet. She looked pale, her eyes were fluttering and her limbs were limp. We called 911 and waited for what seemed an eternity for the ambulance to arrive. When the fire truck, two ambulances and police got there, she perked up. When the paramedic took her from me, she started screaming. It was the sweetest sound ever. It was pretty clear that she was aright but they wanted us to go to the Emergency Room just in case. It was at this point that I started to look around....the table on the patio was covered in empty beer bottles (the accumulation of several days). On the kitchen table were empty two beer bottles from dinner, and on the floor near the garbage, waiting to be carried out to the recycling bin, were two empty wine bottles. (Thankfully we don't keep our crack pipe in the kitchen, ha, ha...). I started to worry less about Grace and more about the fact that they might think that we are alcoholics who dropped our baby because we are intoxicated...Thankfully our good friend Mark is a police officer and happened to be the one at our house that night. I think he vouched for us.

Two days later while Grace was taking a nap I was in the basement doing laundry. Sam asked to go for a run in the treadmill and I let him. I stood right there while he jogged, when he said he was done, I turned it off and went back to the laundry. I left the key in it though....I could hear him hitting the buttons, but instead of taking the key away, I just kept saying "be careful". Suddenly, I there was a terrible scream. Sam was kneeling behind the treadmill and his fingers were caught in the belt. I had to yank his hand free. I honestly thought that his fingers might not come with the hand...thankfully, it turned out to nothing more than very badly burned and cut up fingers...I'm pretty sure that if we'd made a return trip to the ER we would have gotten ourselves a social worker....the bright side of this incident as that Brad now feels slightly less guilty about dropping Grace.

So in a nut shell, that was last week. Did I mention that in the midst of it all, I had the worst case of mastitis that I have ever had? Bad enough that I considered removing my own breast....It was a really lousy week, definitely didn't feel like I shined in the parenting department, and yet we are here, all in one piece. God is faithful, I know he watches over and protects my family. My kids don't seem much worse for the wear...in fact, when we snuggle at night and tell bed time stories Sam asks to "hear the story bout when I was born in the water" and when that ones over he asks, "now tell me the one bout when daddy dropped Grace on her head!"