OK, I've just spent the last 60+ minutes comforting, cleaning, and panicking! Miss Libs was taking a short evening rest when she woke up screaming. I thought she was upset that we were laughing and that it might have woken her up, but when I looked I saw a child covered in blood. Ron grabbed her and we spent nearly 20 minutes trying to calm her down and apply pressure on her VERY bloody nose. I have never seen gushing like this. Poor Ronald's UCLA alumni shirt is probably toast... she used it as a Kleenex. After it seemed to slow down we took her upstairs to a tubby and the second she saw herself in the mirror looking like a reject from a horror movie she FREAKED even more!!! We got her in the tubby and cleaned off a bit-- that's when I fell apart.
We only have had two other frightening parenting moments:
1. Libs unstoppable crying at Ron's cousins wedding. She was only a few months old and we did everything to find the problem-- we stripped her, tried to feed her, tried to burp her, changed her diaper, nothing worked. We simply had to leave the party-- she wouldn't stop crying. After a few moments in the car she calmed down, but that feeling of helplessness is simply unbearable to the woman who likes to control everything.
2. Libs was playing one evening and she bumped her head on our rocking chair. She cried for a moment and then went along with her day. We thought nothing of it until about 2 in the morning when she awoke screaming. Ron and I both tried to console her but she was just not herself. She was only about 5 or 6 months old then and we knew this was not her regular cry. We called Dr. Vashistha and he suggested we take her to the ER. We packed her in the car where she promptly stopped crying and drove to Henry Mayo. We waited in the waiting room for what felt like forever as our darling daughter slept soundly in her car seat. After a few hours we got into see a doctor who looked at her, said it was probably a clogged sinus, gave her Motrin and sent us home. She never even whimpered when he examined her-- she was over whatever it was.
Being a parent is wonderful, but moments like this remind you of how much responsibility it is and how I wish my nurse of a Mother lived closer.
