Time Stops For No Man...Or Woman

Dearest Lydia,

Here we are. Well, here I am anyway...you are nestled sweetly in dreamland. :)

It is almost 11 pm and I'm pretty sure that I too should be snuggling into my warm soft bed for the night, and yet, here I am, wide awake with my mind running circles around itself. AGAIN. Somehow, when the house is quiet, my mind starts working overtime. 

I can't quite put my finger on one thing precisely that is causing me to lose sleep. I think that it is a combination of all the little worries that I try to ignore all day. In the daytime, I stand strong in the faith that God will take care of us, and because of that I can carry myself with strength and confidence. In the dark, I still believe that He holds us in His hands, but that old "fix-it" mom syndrome takes over. 

We are three weeks out from your surgery....a mere 21 days. Those 21 days are going to fly by way faster than I am ready for them to and then, we'll be handing you over for repair of your little ticker. I am much more at peace with this than I was even a month ago (thanks to another beautiful baby girl who sailed right through her own) but there is no way to completely silence that persistently annoying voice that whispers out of the corners of my mind. And its soooo hard to prepare for the fact that our world stops existing for however long it takes to bring you home.

 

This quiet life we have built filled with laughter, smiles, silly boys, and a cozy home will be traded for a hospital room filled with monitors, tubes, wires, doctors and nurses. 

We have already decided that even if your brothers are allowed on the ICU floor that we are not going to bring them down. They love you so much, Liddy, and if I'm scared about what you will look like afterwards, what will seeing you laying there do to them? But with that decision, even though it might be the best one, comes the grim reality that its possible that we will not be seeing them for a couple of weeks. They understand. But it still makes your daddy and I sad to not be with ALL of our kids, even though we know its only temporary. I just have to keep telling myself that after this, we never have to do anything like this again....At least I HOPE not!

Time doesn't stop just because I want it to. I wish so much that I could keep these precious moments forever, without the threat of OHS hanging over our heads, with you and your brothers just the ages you are now (although without some of the teenage attitude Caleb has lately lol). I'd be perfectly content for nothing to ever change. But no one asked me. I can no more stop time than I can change the color of the sky or make the sun stop rising. So I guess that I am just going to be forced to spend 21+ more days sitting up at night, long after everyone is tucked in their beds fast asleep, whittling at my worries like an old stump of wood until something beautiful emerges........

After all, that's how I got you! :)

I love you to the moon and back. I love you to the depths of the oceans. I love you 1000x the number of stars in the sky. Always.

xoxoxoxoxo,

Mommy