I tend to think that I am good mom. I’ve been doing this for <mumble> years, I should be an expert right? My kids are well behaved in public; they are clean, healthy, well adjusted. I got this! And then the evil gods of chaos chuckle and say “That’s what you think!”
It’s Saturday, I have the 2 youngest with me, and my adopted sister. The baby is sitting in the grade-schooler’s lap and they are on the hardwood floor watching TV. I hear a *thunk* followed by a wail. You guessed it; the baby face-planted the floor. I gather her up and give her hugs and squeezes and kisses and make her feel better. I am carrying her on my hip when I realize that dinner is going to burn if I don’t yank it out of the oven RIGHT NOW.
So superwoman (aka: me) rushes to the kitchen grabs a pot holder and single-handedly saves dinner. Literally I pulled dinner out of the oven with one hand, because the other was anchoring my baby to my left hip. Which she reminded me of by letting out a high pitched squeal. Ladies and gentleman the hapless hero saved dinner and BURNED the baby’s foot all in one fell swoop!
Apparently the pan got too close to my left side and the grazed the top of her foot, leaving a ¾ inch welt on the top of her foot. OMYGODWHATHAVEIDONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So I drop the pan on the stove, race to the freezer to get a piece of ice. Let me pause here to say that my icemaker doesn’t so much dispense ice cubes; it prefers to deliver 1 giant ice BLOCK. I frantically pound on the block and finally get a few chips. I close the freezer, sit the baby on the counter so I can easily reach her foot and *splash*. The 24 oz. cup of red colored Kool-Aid that I had poured and then forgotten had the misfortune of being in the space now needed to administer first aid to the baby. So now my attention is split between putting ice on the baby’s foot and trying to keep the advancing red army of destruction from redecorating everything on my kitchen counter (which includes the baby.) Lucky for me, reinforcements arrived in the form of my adopted sister who stemmed the red tide while I stemmed the baby tears.
Now the baby is quiet, but every time she flexes her foot she whines. My other half is at work and has the car, so I called a friend to see if she could run to the store for me to get aloe. Of course she is not home – the gods of chaos gave her the desire to be out having fun this evening. (How dare they!) I KNOW I have aloe somewhere in this house. This is not the first time I needed aloe for some kind of burn, there has to be aloe in this house, right? Chaos gods chuckled while giving each other conspiratorial winks. Of course I couldn’t find it.
Being a paid troubleshooter I rethought my end goal. I want her to not have pain, right? Infant Tylenol! That is a pain reducer. But I have to call a doctor to find out how much to give her. Right, nurse hotline it is. Side note: “Hotline” is a misnomer. They do not a thing quickly. The one I have with my insurance is staffed by old retired nurses who would lose a race to a snail. So I call the number and someone takes my information and says that a nurse would call me back within in 60 minutes. Really… I mean, seriously. So, tick tock tick tock. You know that feeling you get when you place a pizza delivery order and they say 60 minutes but it turns out to be 25? Yeah, no. 59 minutes and 30 seconds and then my phone rings. I won’t torture you with the details of that conversation. But I will say this: people who know me know that I don’t like to repeat myself. I repeated the same information 3 times in a 10 minute conversation. In the end I got the dosage amount. I take the little plunger and measure out exactly what I needed. I pick up the baby, lean her head back and slowly, drop by drop, squeeze the medicine into her mouth. Halfway through this process she decides to do some redecorating of her own. And now I am covered in regurgitated Gerber’s. I think the chaos gods had a belly laugh at that moment.
But, they forgot that I have a wonderful daughter who volunteered to get in the bath with baby while I clean up the floor and myself. 1 hour and 2 clean children later, I am limp on the couch with the baby sleeping on my chest, and that is when my other half saunters in with the Aloe. He leans in for a kiss, I shove the baby into his arms.
Not today Chaos!!!!!
Chaotically Controlled 