Remember when?

I remember the first few days after Muffin, my oldest daughter, was born-nearly eight years ago. I remember we had to sleep with our pinky in her mouth at the hospital because that was the only way she would sleep. The first two nights we were home we put her in a bassinet in our bedroom to sleep and she did OK. I, on the other hand, sat up straight in bed, pulse pounding, adrenaline pumping every time she so much as sighed. After two nights of this, I reluctantly agreed with Andy that she should move down the hall to her bedroom for my sake.

The first night she slept in her room (at a mere four days old) was really the first time she was out of sight of both Andy and I. As I lay in my own bed, Muffin sleeping soundly in hers down the hall, I cried. I imagined her growing up so quickly so that before I knew it, she was walking, then in school, then moving out! I told myself how irrational those tears were but the caring was so intense that I wasn't prepared for it.

Flash forward almost eight years and add two more children. How is it even possible that the same mother who wept over her child advancing to a stage where she could sleep in her own room could not know until morning that her two year old had had a bloody nose? This is how Mator looked when I got her out of bed yesterday morning. At first I thought, "Has she snuck some kind of chocolate into her bed?" Then I used my superior deduction skills and followed the dark trail into her nose and realized it was dried blood! Apparently it had bled and run down her face, avoiding her mouth where her binky was carefully perched. Poor little neglected girl! I really do love her just as much as that baby whose every sigh broke my slumber!