Infant in Arms

I was looking forward to my conference in Rome, GA, because I love to fly. But, I was also a little apprehensive, because I wasn't sure how it would go taking Lily with me. We left for the aiport before lunch and then ate lunch at our terminal. Let me tell you, people in the airport were doing all they could to make everything harder for me. I was carrying a squirming child, a diaper bag, her suitcase, and at one point food, and I'm pretty sure people stood in my way on purpose. My arms were about to break off, and there were several times I thought everything was going to spill ot the ground. But, we made it to the plane!

Apparently when you have a child you get to pre-board. I loved getting on before everyone else.

Getting her read on once we found our seat.

Drinking her milk.

Getting really sleepy.

She fell asleep before we even taxied away from the gate, so that was pretty awesome. She woke up during out decent over the metro area.

Looking out the window.

She was perfectly calm during flight. After we landed, we had to wait in the plane for 30 minutes, because the plane leaving our gate was running late. I spent all of that time wrangling her. She wanted to go everywhere and do everything. Luckily, the people sitting around me were the opposite of the people in the airport - they were so friendly. She stood on my lap and was touching the noses and heads of the older couple in front of us, and they were so good with her. 

At the airport, Morgan was waiting for us, and helped take some of the load, because I'm not sure how I would have gotten everything on the train. We road the train up to my old office in Midtown and Lily showed off for all of the ladies there. The last they saw her she couldn't walk yet. Then Aunt Jen arrived and whisked Lily away for 2 days of fun while I went up to Rome for my conference.

I'm told Lily and Hana had a beautiful love affair while Lily was visiting.

This must be her fake model face.

Love.

This was the face she made every time she saw Hana.

Aunt Jen thought she'd picked up a leaf - surprise it's a used cigarette!

I didn't need another reason to abhor smoking, but I got one anyway.

 Aunt Jen took Lily to the aquarium on Thursday afternoon:

Jen dropped Lily off at my office on Thursday afternoon, and we went to the office's Halloween party in the rec room of the building. Then we walked across the street to Davinci's and had dinner with some coworkers. Then we hopped the train back to the airport.

I stuffed everything I could into my suitcase, including Lily's suitcase, so I had less to carry on the trip home. Hartsfield-Jackson was not a very kid-friendly airport, or maybe it was just that terminal. It took me a while to find a place that sold milk. But then we settled at our gate. We were on the red eye, departing at 10:12 pm and she was so tired and tired of being held. She squeeled like a little wild banshee several times while we were waiting. I could just imagine the thoughts of all the people wiating to get on the plane.

Getting sleepy before boarding.

Bad quality, but it was dark, so this is how it turned out. She slept across my knees the whole flight back.

I have actually never flown at night before, and it was beautiful to see all the lights below and the stars at that perspective. She woke up as we were getting off the plane and was quite grumpy because of being awakened at midnight. She gave little wimpers all the way to baggage claim. It was pretty pathetic, but really cute, too. As soon as she saw Daddy, everything changed. She was instantly super happy. And once we got home and she saw Papa, she got hyper. She fell back asleep around 1:30 am.

She was so happy to go back to school today. She LOVES her school and her teacher, and they are having a Parade for Jesus today that should be really fun for her.

All in all - we survived!

Thanks to Aunt Jen and Uncle Skip for watching Lily and making sure she had a blast!

Traits I Want to Instill in Lily

I've been thinking a lot lately about the things I hope for Lily as she grows up. I don't wish for her to love volleyball like me, or that she'll do certain things with her life, make certain grades, or be good at certain things. I think mainly about the type of character she'll have. This has been weighing on my mind a lot lately as she starts to understand more and more about what goes on around her. I don't want to wait for the day she understands something, and start teaching her lessons at that point. Why not start now? Then she'll never have a memory of it being any other way.

My sister-in-law, Jen, passed on an article to me when I was pregnant called "10 Things to Pray for Your Children". I typed up an abbreviated version and framed it above her changing table in our old house. It's in storage right now with most of our other belongings, but I used to pick something on the list every time I changed her and prayed for that particular thing. The article is here: 10 Things to Pray for Your Children

If anyone wants the abbreviated version to print and hang, just let me know and I can send it to you.
It is a great list for any Christian parents who wants be prayer warriors for their child. It lists several character traits that I hope for Lily.
These traits are the main ones that have been on my mind as of late:

1. Love for God.

God says if we love Him that we will obey Him. My hope is that her love for God will outweigh her love for anything else in life, and that she'll believe that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, and live her life according to what it says. I hope she won't see her faith as a "religion", but as a way of life, that effects every thought, every act, and every decision she makes.

2. Faith in God.

Everyone makes mistakes, but I want her to understand that God is the One who will never let her down. He will always be there for her, He will always love her, and she is never alone in anything she may be faced with. Her trust should be in Him, because He is in control of every second.

3. Love for others.

There's not much that bothers me more than judgement. Not that I haven't ever judged, or don't still catch myself judging, but I hope I've come a long way as I've gotten older. Community is so important to me - maybe because I'm a woman, maybe because I'm a mother. I believe God made us to desire to be in communion with those around us.

No matter what mistakes a person makes, that person is still a child of God and He loves that person just as much as any other. I hope that she'll look past sins to see the sinner, that she'll always have her eyes open for needs and be willing to help meet them, that she'll never be so busy that she isn't available to others (I've been there!), and that she'll have a servant's heart. I hope she's kind to all who cross her path, and in being so, is an example of the love and forgiveness that God has shown to her.

4. Manners

I hope that she'll respect authority and others around her, that she'll be slow to anger, and that she'll never allow the way she might be treated to effect how she treats others.

And I pray that God will give me the strength to be all of these things myself - to be a wise mother - one she can look up to and be proud of.

Musings

Lily will be 13 months in 4 days.

I am going ot be really honest here and say I feel a little disappointed now that her 1st birthday has passed. All of her "first" holidays have passed. I guess it just seems like she has grown up so much already, and I am so nostalgic for the times that have already passed. I want to go back and relive every single moment. I feel like time is just moving faster and faster, and I have found myself looking back at pictures from when she was really tiny a lot more lately. I think my disappointment revolves around the fact that so many important moments in her life are behind us already.

At the same time, I feel like I might be a little bit crazy. There's a lot more to come, so shouldn't I just be looking forward to all of that? I guess that's what it's like to be a parent for me - always so bittersweet. Every milestone brings both pride and then a sadness that she has grown up just that much more.

As someone who thought she'd never have a child, I think I hold onto every moment a little bit tighter than I would have otherwise.

I still feel like she was born just yesterday. I find myself as obsessively in love with her as the day I met her.

And I wonder - will the constant urge to snuggle her ever go away? Cause that may be a little odd when she is a teenager :) Does it ever get easier to say goodbye to her at preschool? I think more and more often I daydream about leaving work to pick her up and go play all day. I think the working mother thing is actually getting harder for me.

But, no matter what the circumstances are - she lights up our lives. And our circumstances are actually pretty fantastic - we are enjoying our new lives in this southwest Florida paradise.

A couple pictures from the other morning:

Lily's Hospital Visit

Friday night we were looking forward to a very fun weekend. I was playing on the floor with Lily. She likes to run to my arms and when I catch her I fall backwards like she has knocked me over, and she falls on top of me. When she ran to me the first time I noticed that she had some wet yellow residue on her chin - I wiped it off, wondering a little where it had come from, and we continued to play until she was tired and I put her to bed. Then I went to the bathroom to take my contacts out and noticed that there was yellow all over my face and dress and hands. It suddenly hit me that I should be a ot more concerned about what this was coming from. I searched the living room but couldn't find anything that would leave yellow markings. Then I searched the pills in the cabinet and found a yellow one thats coating left the same exact color behind when I got it wet. I wasn't too alarmed, but I did the correct thing and called poison control to find out what kind of reaction, if any, I could expect, was this pill to be the cause of the yellow residue. This is where the night changed dramatcially for us.

I'm pretty sure the man who answered the phone did not have children, because I feel like he was almost trying to incite panic instead of keeping me calm. His two most poignant remarks were "there is an effective antedote if given within the first hour" and "this is absoluetly the worst medicine she could have gotten ahold of". Well, at this point it had been about 45 minutes, and I knew I had to pack her bag, get her out of bed, and drive to the hospital, and I also knew that I never wanted to hear the word "antedote" used in reference to my child. I asked him that I had not actually seen her with the pill, just that the coloring matched, and he said that the pill would cause a delayed response and I would see nothing soon, and that I should hang up immediately and drive to the emergency room.

And so I threw on some flipflops, grabbed a cup of milk, and the 3 of us hopped in the car and drove to the hospital. I was really amazed at how quickly the responded. We were in the back with nurses the minute I had the 1st form filled out. And other than the very first nurse we saw, all of the nurses and doctors were incredibly good with her. They kept her smiling and were so friendly and helpful. they kept her distracted why they got her hooked up to all the machines and did her EKG. The two men who did her IV were amazing with her, and they kept her so entertained that she didn't even cry or move until they were completely finished.

At the ER.

After being at the ER for about an hour, the doctor told us that they would be sending us over to the Children's Hopsital so we could be admitted for the night. I think this was very hard for Clay, following behind the ambulance in the car. But, the light was on inside, so he could see both of us and how calm she was all the way over.

She snuggled with Daddy for awhile after we got to the children's hospital, then finally went to sleep around 2 am. When she woke up at 7 am she was in a very good mood and wanted to play in her baby hospital bed.

This was her trying to pull everything off of the wall.

She thought this "cage" was the greatest thing to play in - thank goodness. It would have been very hard to have to try to keep her in one place hooked to machines, had she not loved to be in there. She liked to look through the clear part at people, look through the bars, run around inside, and have things dropped ove rthe top to her.

She took the monitor off her toe - it has a bright red light and she was always intrigued by it.

Finally taking a nap on Saturday - much needed after only 5 hours of sleep during the night.

The next morning when nothing had happened, we knew she was going to be okay, but I am still having a hard time recovering from the experience.

It's hard to have 5 people lecture you on the location of medicine in your home, and then send a social worker to speak with you. Luckily, she was very kind and explained that she just had to be there because of policy, and had much less to say than anyone else. But, is there really a better place than the highest cabinet in the kitchen - at Lily's age? It would be impossible for her to reach the medicines. A lock box seems like overkill right now, and something could be accidentally dropped just as easily when taking medicine from one of those.

Having my role as a mother questioned has left me reeling a little.

I am, however, very thankful that my little girl remains healthy. Nana searched the house while we were gone and couldn't find any yellow substance anywhere. What actually happened reamins a mystery.