Cinder-Livvy

Cinder-Livvy

Thursday, October 6, 2011

When Reality Catches Up

The other day I came home from work stressed to the max and really struggling with a headache.  Liv to my delight was taking her daily nap a little later than usual.  I grinned, got the recap of the day from Grandma and then hurriedly ran upstairs to try and catch a few zzzs myself and see if I would wake up feeling like a new woman.  At this point Olivia had already been down for close to two hours but I thought mayyyybe I can get twenty, maybe thirty minutes of rest before she wakes up.  Thirty minutes later one of the neighborhood teenagers buzzed by blaring his stereo and woke me up, I sat there and listened for a second surely expecting to hear some stirring on the monitor but nothing.  Groggy, I just sort of laid back down and dozed again until another car noise rudely woke me up again.  I looked at the clock and thought surely that can't be right - I've been asleep for over an hour in total and still the monitor was silent.

I sat there for what seemed like forever and started getting sweaty palms thinking about what could be going on in the room just on the other side of our shared wall.  Olivia had just had a cold, a flu shot, and another HLHS baby went to sleep one night and just didn't wake up the next morning.  Could my baby have died while I was sleeping in the room next to her?  I didn't know and I really didn't want to find out.  I could have rushed in there but I fought with myself, if something was wrong, it had likely gone wrong hours before and there was nothing I would be able to do to save her at that point.  At this point of my internal struggle, I'm pacing around my room for what felt like forever (it was three minutes) and go into the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and try to get myself together.  I heard a noise and slammed the faucet shut, then another noise, it was the sweetest most blissful sound of Olivia waking up.

Quietly I made my way into her room and there she was all groggy with bedhead and a rosy face complete with little lines from her crib sheets from sleeping so hard.  At first she looked a little confused like she still expected her Grandma to be there, but then quickly looked happy to see Mommy and get her "afternoon" started.  I could have cried, laughed and thrown up all at once, I was so relieved to see she was perfectly fine after her 3+ hour nap.  It just served as a reminder to me that no matter how great things are going it could be a completely different story in the blink of an eye. Needless to say, I hugged that little girl extra tight the rest of the day and night.

And just as a sidenote, she stayed up over an hour later than usual I'm sure as result of her sweet afternoon slumber!

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