Conscious Mom

This time, our fist ambulance ride. (Before you read this, we're all fine now.) After a relatively normal morning yesterday Maia went down for her nap early and slept a long, long time. She woke up crying and vomiting, with a high fever, then immediately fell back to sleep. Fast onset fever, vomiting, lethargy and sleepiness. Not good. Not good at all. In fact, red flagged every baby book as 'CALL DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY'. I tried the doctor... busy... tried again... busy. After about ten tries, the operator informed me that phone lines were down throughout the area and there was no possible way to get in touch with the doctor. I hesitated.... was I over reacting, kids do get sick... am I ...

I don't have time to write a post. I don't even have time to go through my iPhoto files and upload a picture for Wordless Wednesday. Nor do I have time to tell you why I don't have time. But life passes quickly, and kids phases, stages, and games change weekly. If I don't record what Maia's up to right now I risk losing it all to history. The little blue wagon: Maia likes to pile a random assortment of items into her blue wagon and push it around the house. At any given time there could be stuffed animals, blocks, a colander, measuring cups, pot lids, shoes, books, and raw potatoes in the wagon. Once one of my bras ended ...

but here are some recent pictures.

Yesterday Maia and I saw a caterpillar on the road. She picked it up, and fearing she would pinch it too hard, or put it in her mouth, I gently returned it to the ground. We watched it for a while, admiring its coloring and the way it moved so gracefully. A wonderful mother-daughter moment in nature, I stopped to think, just long enough to miss the opportunity to prevent disaster. I screamed 'no' and reached to move her away from the caterpillar, just a split second too late to prevent her foot from crashing down on it. She screamed when saw the remains of the caterpillar, complete with colorful fluid leaking out, and frantically said "more, more, more", while ...

At first we thought it was mosquito bites. Maia scratched and squirmed and cried, and was more miserable than I've ever seen her. It was like she knew in her young brain the significance mosquito bites have had on her homeland and was lamenting all that loss and suffering. But they itched too much, for too long, and we decided it must be flea bites. We have no cats or dogs, but maybe a visitor dragged them in the house, we hypothesized. Then they got big, red, raised, and even more itchy, which an hour earlier I didn't think was possible. Poison ivy? Poison oak? Some other contact dermatitis? On the soles of her feet? Unlikely. An allergic reaction to ...

I've collected some of my favorite quotes about peace for this year's Blog Blast for Peace. If you have any of your own quotes to share, please leave a comment. "It is isolation that is critical to war. You cannot be abusive when you realize your connectedness." -David Kadlec "If you have a gun, you can go out and shoot one, two, three, five people. But if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions." -Thich Nhat Hanh "War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; ...

OK, experienced baby-raisers, let's help parents-to-be sort through the mounds of crap sold for babies these days. What product did you absolutely have to have? What product did people tell you you absolutely HAD to have but it turned out you didn't need at all?