Thanksgiving adventures

Well, we're back to the grind after having Dada all to ourselves for an entire week. It was awesome. It was also exhausting, because it was Thanksgiving. And I didn't even cook! Nor did we battle any traffic or Black Friday crowds. Thanksgiving just takes a lot out of me. Sorry to gripe, but it's my least favorite holiday. I barely even got to eat any turkey, but I did get lots of stuffing and mashed potatoes, so all was well. No pie either, now that I think about it, but you know what? I'm perfectly happy to save my gorging for the Christmas season. Plenty of yumminess coming our way!

I wanted to boil down our Thanksgiving holiday to one fantastic thing and one horrible thing, but I'm having trouble coming up with just one fantastic thing. Having Anthony here was wonderful. I love to see him interact with Katie, and of course it gives me a break. He washed so many bottles, too! Love that man. He also put up our Christmas lights, yay! It feels unnaturally early to be doing that, but I'm glad because it's so much effort to put them up and take them down. Might as well get some good use out of them, right? We also had incredible - no, insane - weather for most of the week. Our friends were in town from Seattle, and we got to spend some time with them. I even had a girls' lunch out! WOW!

And...the horrible thing. Two horrible things, actually. One is that Katie woke up from every nap all week except one, screaming and crying and refusing to go back to sleep. She was really freaked out about something. A couple times we were able to get her back to bed after 15-20 minutes of screaming, but mostly she just refused to go back to sleep. So much for relaxing during her naps.

The second horrible thing happened on Saturday. We were across the street, sitting on a park bench playing with pine needles. Well, I was sitting - Katie doesn't really do that. She was climbing up, sliding down, rolling on her tummy, running to get more pine needles, going over to touch the trash can, you get the picture. She climbed up next to me, scooted around and dangled her legs over the back of the bench, slid down, and somehow managed to bump her chin. Problem was, she had her bottom lip between her teeth at the time, so she bit the dickens out of it. She screamed bloody murder, and to be honest, her mouth looked like bloody murder too. It bled so profusely that I thought she'd knocked out a tooth. (She hadn't.) I also thought she might have bitten right through her lip, since it was bleeding both inside and out. (She hadn't.) It just bled A LOT. And poor Katie wouldn't let us put pressure on it, or put ice on it, or hold her, or do anything at all. She just stood there screaming and crying and bleeding and trying to wipe the blood out of her mouth, which I imagine tasted very yucky. She refused the cool teething ring we keep in the fridge for boo-boos. She would swat us away screaming if we tried to touch her. It was terrible.

At one point, when we thought she'd bitten through her lip, we thought we might have to take her to the ER. But, Anthony made a bottle for her and after a few refusals, she calmed down enough to drink it. Then I read her every book in her book basket, and she ended up passing out on my lap. (Which never happens, by the way!) While she was asleep, we got to take a small peek inside her lip to see what had happened. Two tooth-shaped gouges were the cause of all the blood. They were pretty deep, but not bad enough to need stitches. The cut on the outside was pretty minor too. And now, two days later, the gouges have kind of filled themselves in, and there's just some weird blistering going on. Clearly it's healing well, thank goodness!

So those things, combined with the drama of Thanksgiving Day with the in-laws, actually make me a little bit glad to have things back to normal. We went to preschool today, and so far her nap seems to be fine, so WHEW! We get a month to recharge before the next round of drama begins. But the aforementioned holiday yumminess is going to help a lot!