Trauma, drama and cute baby pictures

Yesterday Alyssa said, "Ma-Ma" for the first time (FINALLY), prompting me to take these extremely adorable shots of her following her bath.







Then we ran a bunch of errands. One of the places we went was Home Depot to buy flowers for the backyard and also to look at doors. My favorite moment was when Scott knocked on a door, tryng to figure out if it was solid or hollow, and Amanda said, "Daddy, don't be silly. Nobody's ever gonna answer that door!"

The trauma started when we got home. Amanda fell down and skinned both of her knees. And the drama immediately followed. She has quite a gift for the dramatic but she's always been pretty tough when it comes to injuries. She'll cry for a minute and then go right back to playing. But not yesterday. Yesterday she screamed like it was the end of the world and I felt horrible for her. I brought her jellybeans to distract her while I took care of the knee but she continued to scream as if her head had been torn off, well not that you could continue screaming in that particular instance, but you get the idea.

What I wanted to say was, "Sweetie, when I was a little girl, they didn't have Disney princess band-aids and Neosporin with Pain Relief. We had plain beige band-aids and smelly orange methiolade, which I presume my father learned about back in the days he served as a medic in the National Guard, probably during the very same class they trained him in torturing the enemy. Yes, when I was a little girl, if you came inside crying because half the skin was missing from your knee, first you'd get in trouble for ruining your new school clothes and then, as your siblings looked on in sympathy mixed with horror, you'd have to take the long walk down the hallway to your parents' bathroom where your dad would promise you, "this will only sting for a second," before he applied liberal amounts of the alcohol-based disinfectant methiolade, which believe me, burned like a… uhh it BURNED A LOT when it came in contact with your bleeding knee. The methiolade always hurt far more than the actual injury but if I cried my Dad would say, 'Sweetie, when I was a little boy they didn't have band-aids and methiolade, if you skinned your knee they'd just cut your leg off above the injury and you'd keep right on playing...'"

Anyway, Amanda made a rather quick recovery when I pulled out the, "Looks like you won't be able to play outside any more today," card. She was totally fine for the rest of the day, planting flowers and playing endlessly. But then this morning, shortly after waking, she announced, "I can't walk!" and then sadly added. "I guess you'll have to carry me everywhere. And I think I need more jellybeans."

When I informed her that we were having waffles for breakfast and that I would be unable to carry her to the table because I had Alyssa in my arms, she said, "FINE! I guess I'll have to crawl then." (Who knew being a parent was going to be this much fun!?!) After a couple minutes of watching her crawl down the hallway I decided to suggest that perhaps crawling might be a tad harder on the knees than walking. She, quite huffily, said, "I CAN'T WALK because I can't bend my knee!" (Right, not much knee bending required for crawling.) Then she started in with this half-walk/half-crawl thing that was actually quite amusing to watch and, as expected, she only did it when she knew we were watching. (I KNOW, I'm cruel but did you see the Ray Charles movie? He was BLIND and his mom didn't help him at all!)

So when Amanda rather quickly figured out she wasn't getting much mileage from the knee injury, we had one of those "It's a Miracle!" scenes in our very own living room. It was like that scene from Heidi where Shirley Temple taught the pretty girl in the wheelchair how to walk. Amanda announced, "Mommy, Mommy, look! I can walk again!" I promise you it was a beautiful moment. Tears all around.