last minute Stitches.

Well we had quite the mini adventure over the 4th of July. We had plans to see our good friends Kattie and Paul in Fort Riley where we were stationed in the army. They tenitivly are moving soon to Georgia so I wanted to use the oppurtunity at hand to see them before they left. Its been two years since I've seen Kattie, when they last visited us and I've missed her a lot.
The plan was to leave late Thursday afternoon...which did eventually happene...but not before a small mishap.

Thursday Morning Annabelle was all dressed for ballet in her leotard, tights and cute as can be bun. We had about 5 minutes before we had to leave so I thought I'd just quickly check my emails. Now, in our house, if you haven't seen it all the rooms sort of lead into one another making an amusing circle for my kids to run around. So, they were being typical and chasing one another around through each different doorway. Thats when tragedy struck. Annabelle tripped and fell over her shoes and slamed her self face first into the doorframe of the bathroom door. I could tell by the shrill she let out that it was bad and ran and picked her up. All I saw was mass blood and chunks coming out of her mouth. I screamed for Jeremy and he ran to where we were. I was freakin out. I though she knocked her teeth out. Luckily, he pointed out to me that the chunks were cheerios that were in her mouth. But she was bleeding badly and he could see well enough that she had a hole in her lip and we needed to take her to the ER. Jeremy got annabelle to calm down (and me as well) and we quietly made the 25 minute trip to the hospital. When we arrived I was pleased to see that there was no one in the ER and they took us back right of way. By this time Annabelles mouth had quit bleeding and we could better see the wound. Her bottom lip was split about a 1/2 inch downward, the only way I can describe it is it looked like she had a triangle of her lip missing. It looked awful. So here she is, in her ballet attire, covered in blood. But she certainly wasn't missing her smile. We had to wait for the Dr. for an hour before he came in to see her, in the mean time Annabelle was amusing various nurses by showing off her ballet "spins" and "happy feet" (1st position)
After the dr came in he explained our options. Told us though it was just a lip wound it was in a bad place because it crosses the vermilion boarder (the part where your lip transitions from pink to flesh colored) This makes it a little more difficult to ensure the lip is perfectly lined up, so they decided to knock her out with Katamine. They got preped about 10 minutes later. After injecting her with katamine through two shots, within 30 seconds she was out. This is one form of consious sedation. her eyes were open and she can breath on her own but her mind was turned off. She appeared to be zoned out, had no movement and was unresponsive. Honestly, she looked the way people look in movies when they die. Her eyes were opened but they were empty. That part was really hard for me so I left the room while they stitched her up (6 stitches) , which only took about 10 minutes.
When I came back into the room she was still knocked out cold (again she had her eyes open) It took some time, about an hour, but she slowly woke up. Sort of groggy and very disoriented. She thought for quite sometime that "mommy had 4 eyes" Once she woke up, she was happiest to see her bubu and Isaiah, although nervous and full of guilt, was happy to see her as well.
For the rest of the day they got a long great!

Well, that was the start of the day. After 4 hours at the hospital we got home around 12:30. I had to hurry at that point because I still had to finish laundry and pack our bags for our 31/2 day trip...that requires a lot of stuff for an 9 month old. But I finished up and we left the house at around 4:30, only a little bit later than we had originally planned on leaving. It was a long drive with the kids, but we made it. Annabelle remained in a bubble for the entire trip because she had to be extra carefull with her stitches.

With all that said, we did have a great 4th of July weekend. In Kansas, fireworks aren't illegal like they are here so we had a great time shooting off fireworks almost as big as the display they put on later that night. It was really nice to Kattie, I miss her tons. All in all, it turned out to be just fine of a weekend....even if Annabelle was a little bruised and banged up.

She, by the way, got her stitches removed today. It appears that the scar won't be as bad as I had originally anticipated. She is one brave little girl.