Picking Up the Pieces, Putting Them Away

Here are the girls riding bikes when they were younger. I think that was Stinky's first broken arm. She has made us old pros at emergency room visits.

Yes, well. Today has been pretty long again. I didn't sleep very well last night and a lot of today was spent trying to get a certain Stinky girl to drink and eat something...Anything. The drinking was the most important. She kept telling me everything tasted weird. She had some water, a little Sprite and finally pineapple orange juice. The Dr. said she had to drink things that had calories, so any of those fancy 0 calorie Propel type drinks were out.

As you know, my girls and I are big eaters, so this whole concept of trying to get Stinky to eat and her not wanting to, is extremely foreign to me. It took her over four hours to eat a piece of cinnamon toast and a few raspberries. I got smart at dinnertime and made her favorite food - a BLT. She's never said no to bacon before, and this was no exception. She ate a half sandwich and it gave me hope that she was getting better. Behold the power of smoked pig.

Tomorrow I'll go back to work, sit in my beige cubicle and try really hard not to call home every five seconds for updates. The sound of my daughter's coughing and belabored breathing will be replaced by the guy who sits behind me with the bad acid reflux trying to disguise his chronic belching by saying, "bwifff" or "bwarrrf". I'll ask him if he's speaking Klingon like I usually do and we'll both laugh and things will start to go back to normal. Being reminded of what the alternative can look like, normal sounds pretty good.