I love this picture with the bear at the table draped in Louisa's favorite blankie.
Mmm...mmm...enjoying that fresh squeezed orange juice. Plus, any beverage is better when you have a straw.
Time for the Happy Birthday song...she loves it! She had been singing it a lot to me and Landen since we recently had birthdays.
Taking a big breath to blow out those candles...
And blowing them out...well, she got 2 of them anyways. Landen was eager to help! What a sweetheart...we had such a fun day. We karaoked after dinner, the kids just loved that. We finished the day off letting Louisa pick out a movie at Blockbuster to watch at bedtime...she chose Cinderella part III...and bibbity-bobbity-booed through the whole thing. The next day it was a little hard to go back to the usual routine...she was still a little wound up. So at nap time I told her she could go lay down in Mommy's bed...she took of like a shot (Louisa has a tendency to run practically everywhere she goes. She even loves to run laps around the yard.) As she went around the corner of the bed she took a good spill (I think she slipped on a recipe page I had torn out of a magazine) and was crying pretty good. I laid her on our bed to calm her down and noticed a big splotch of blood on the pillow. I was praying it was a split lip like the one other time I have seen my child bleeed...but it wasn't. It was a nice sized gash under her eye. So she is crying and bleeding all over (bot she didn't seem too phased because she doesn't even really know what blood is.) I get her a juice box to calm her down and try to put a damp washcloth on the wound to stop the bleeding. She didn't like the washcloth so I ditched that. She sat there sipping her juice box and that's when I hit a semi-panic...I couldn't believe this was happening to my perfect little girl. In one second she went from being fine to having this bleeding gash right by her eye and I figured she was going to need stitches. I called Rhett and he rushed home and we all hopped in the car to go the Phoenix Children's Hospital urgent care...it was about 15-20 minutes away....as we get close I look at my driving direction/info printout and it says the hours are 5:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m. I'm wondering if that can be right so I call them. And sure enough, they are not open. So I call my pediatrician while we head back towards their office. They got back to me right away and told me about another pedicatric urgent care - the exit to which we had passed a mile or two back so we turn around again. Louisa was perfectly calm this entire time - in fact she had fallen asleep as this did happen right at nap time. We pull up to the pediatric urgent care (Cornerstone on Stapley and Baseline for those of you in the area) and it's pretty empty so we get right in. The Dr. on duty was great....he took a look at it and confirmed the need for stitches but since she was a girl (and a dang cute one at that) said he would try to find someone in plastics to do it. A few minutes later he came back and said that the Chief of Plastic Surgery for the Children's Hospital at Banner Desert had a hour free right then and would taken us "right now" so to head straight there and call them on our way to start the info transfer process etc...What luck! More like, what a blessing! I felt some relief knowing she was getting some of the best care possible. This Dr. only works on children and he and his team were very conscientious, explaining everything to two very nervous, anxious parents. So like I said, roller-coaster! I did go ahead and take a picture after we got home from the Dr.'s office....
We got her a smoothie on the way home which she is enjoying here...I guess this picture makes the cut look quite a bit bigger than it is due to the bruise so here is the close-up I wasn't going to post because it was so gruesome...but that other one is almost worse.
We got her a smoothie on the way home which she is enjoying here...I guess this picture makes the cut look quite a bit bigger than it is due to the bruise so here is the close-up I wasn't going to post because it was so gruesome...but that other one is almost worse.
Even now it makes my stomach hurt to look at these pictures. The stitches healed perfectly and with any luck the scar won't be very noticeable a year from now. The Dr. did warn us that it will be pretty red and raised for the next year though. And then a few days after this...we had her big family birthday party. Invites had already been sent and Rhett and I had been scheming about her cake for a week or two. Here are a few pictures of the big #3 family party...
Louisa declaring her age of 3 years old.
Sneaking a taste of that carousel.
Clapping for the crowd's very robust rendition of Happy Birthday!
Clapping for herself upon blowing out her candles (with the help of several cousins). Phew! She got a lot of lovely gifts from everyone and overall it was a great birthday week despite having our first medical emergency. It's been a good 6 weeks now and she still points out her "owie" a lot. She talked about the whole accident quite a bit for the first month but hasn't so much lately. It was always interesting to see what would cause her to start talking about it and sometimes it seemed to come out of nowhere. So that was the fist week of our Spring...and it pretty much seems to have followed that roller-coaster pattern.
