Promptings

Please remember to listen. Or learn to listen. Or be willing to listen.

Wherever it is you fall right now.

Last night Charlotte was having a horrible time sleeping. I chalked it up to the fact that she had napped longer and later than normal, and I had then kept her up later than normal. Typically she goes to bed around 7:30, last night it was a little after 9. Between the time that she went to bed and the time that I went to bed, around 11, I had gone back in to settle her down and tuck her back in two or three times, and Aaron had gone in once. Each time I went in she had thrown something out of the crib, so I figured she was just getting super tired and realizing that whatever it was that she ritually sleeps with was missing from her reach.

I stirred a few times in the night when she started crying again, but she was settling herself down within just a couple of minutes, so I would drift back to sleep each time.

And then around 4am I was wide awake.

Being in the pregnant state that I am, this automatically defaults to a trip to the bathroom, after which I laid back down in bed. Wide awake.

And then she started crying again.

And I knew INSTANTLY what was wrong.

She had a hair elastic around her wrist.

You may call it intuition, or a hunch or coincidence, or whatever you'd like.

But really-what are the odds of that randomly occurring to me at 4am all those hours later?

I know without a doubt that I was very specifically prompted to get in to my daughter and get that off her wrist.

Quite frankly, I do not know how her hand was not completely black. I do not know how in the world she found one of her teeny tiny hair elastics in her crib in the dark, or why there was even one in there. But I do know that judging by when she started crying last night, it was on her for at least 6 hours. It was tight enough that it was cutting in to her skin. Her hand was swollen to nearly twice it's normal size-so big that it was almost hard to the touch.

She likes to wear the older girls' hair elastics as bracelets and has recently taken to using her own for the same. Problem being that while the others are big and loose on her, hers are tiny and even on her very petite little wrist they are too tight. The times in the past when she has put them on, her hand is purple within a matter of minutes.

She has always come to us and shows us her hand when she has put one on so that we can take it off, as obviously it hurts. And despite the fact that she doesn't talk much, she uses the word "hand" frequently. Why she didn't show me her hand any of the times I went in to put her back to bed or even just tell me "hand" like she normally does, I do know not.

What I do know is that I am grateful for the stillness of 4am, the prompting to check for a hair elastic, and that I didn't blow it off. Who knows what would have happened to her little fingers had I waited any longer.....

(and grateful for my husband who happily got up to help me just a few minutes after 4-giving up his last 30min of sleep this morning-since I could not for the life of me decide if I should go with a cold compress to reduce the freak amount of swelling, or a hot compress to encourage circulation)

Life is always so loud.

Don't forget to listen.