I’m sitting here struggling to type out some words. This is largely due to the fact that I practically cut my index finger off while chopping up a tomato last night. P always warns me that I’m risking severe injury when I don’t sharpen my knives before I use them, but that requires a lot of effort and it’s so much easier to walk around in pain clutching my Neosporin-to-Go and a box of flexible Band-Aids while complaining about how bad my finger hurts.
Between you and me, I have no idea how I’m going to get the garland on my front porch now. The index finger is absolutely essential to that process. You wouldn’t think it would be, but you would be wrong. And, honestly, I think it serves me right for not getting our outdoor decorations up before now. I always try (and fail!) to convince P we need to put them up the weekend after Thanksgiving to get maximum seasonal enjoyment, but there is thing called HUNTING SEASON that trumps outdoor illumination.
But rumor has it that the lights are going up later today and I’ll do the best I can to decorate the front porch in spite of my compromised index finger. Rumor also has it that P is definitely working on his gift list and it will be ready on Friday.
My mom is in town so we made a trip back to the hospital to see Baby Luke yesterday. My sister (Not my twin, by the way. She’s four years younger.) is doing really well and when the nurse came in to ask her to rate her pain on that stupid pain chart with all the faces, she answered that she was a two. A two? A two still shows a smiley face. I thought everyone knew that you never answer lower than a five. Heck, I would rate my finger between a six and a seven, possibly even an eight if it weren’t for the anesthetic I sprayed on it earlier.
But no one really seemed that concerned about my finger. In fact, no one even asked me to rate my pain, which just seems wrong since it’s not like I got an epidural before I cut my finger.
While the nurse was tending to my sister, I took it upon myself to change Luke out of his hospital-issued attire and change him into something a little fancier. My poor brother-in-law didn’t grow up in a family of women, so he called out to my sister, “Melanie is playing dress up with our baby.” To which she replied, “OH GOOD!” because all those years we dressed up our dolls and cats totally prepared us for playing dress up with real live babies.
Of course part of my reason for wanting to dress him up was purely for the chance to unwrap him and look at his sweet fat baby legs. I gently laid him on the bed, unwrapped him and made the strategic error of checking his diaper. It was a very full diaper. All I wanted was to put him in a blue gown and instead I ended up having to wipe newborn tar off his bottom while he screamed at the injustice of life.
Just as I got him all cleaned up, I slipped a new diaper under his little bottom and he retaliated by peeing all over me. I forgot that boys come with a weapon. So then I had to start cleaning him up all over again while he voiced his opposition and I kept calling to my sister, “HE’S FINE! HE’S TOTALLY FINE!”
And he was. By the time she saw him again, he was in a pretty (handsome?) little gown, peacefully wrapped in his blue satin blankie with a sweet blue sweater cap on his head.
So of course we had to unwrap him and take some pictures. It’s what we do.
Bless his heart, he didn’t seem to mind.