A Mommy Story

It’s been such a busy 36 hours here, full of ups and downs and uncertainties. I’ve barely had time to sit down long enough to process it all.

The good:
Remember that job I applied for in a local small hospital? I got it! I’ll be working in the Birth Center as a labor/delivery/postpartum nurse. I’m thrilled to be starting my nursing career in a specialty I’m interested in, and the smaller hospital size may work to my favor.

The bad:
It’ll be a long commute – over 45 minutes. And I was a little surprised to realize that the starting pay is equal to what I used to make as a technical writer five years ago. Ah well, it’ll be worth it to be working with mamas and babies.

The good:
After Mira’s well-child check when she turned two, we were told to schedule an appt. with Children’s Hospital for a speech evaluation. Mira had an evaluation with Help Me Grow last fall, but her pediatrician wanted to see a more aggressive therapy schedule. After waiting over a month, we got an appointment and Mira spent the morning with the speech pathologist today. She was amazed that Mira can speak in full 3-4 word sentences. We heard the word “gifted” again.

The bad:
Although she can speak in 3-4 word sentences, good luck trying to figure out what those words are. Mira is a smart little kid, but she was diagnosed with apraxia of speech. It means that somewhere between her brain and the muscles in her mouth, the message is getting garbled, resulting in poor muscle coordination with her mouth.

It’s nothing that therapy can’t fix, although I’m not looking forward to the fight we’ll have trying to convince the World’s Most Stubborn Toddler to cooperate in even more speech therapy.

The not-so-good:
Cordy’s had a rough week or so. She’s been extremely uncooperative, rude and had several outbursts when frustrated. The culmination was at summer camp today, when she freaked out at swimming time, refusing to go into the water, pinching another child, and then when she had a full-out meltdown, she kicked her teacher and then lost control of her bladder, peeing on her teacher. Not her best day.

The uncertain:
Tomorrow Cordy goes in for surgery. It’ll be early in the day, and as long as the hospital has wireless I’ll probably be tweeting to keep from going insane from worry. I’m sure her tooth has been hurting her – maybe it was the reason she’s been acting out so much? – but the thought of my little girl undergoing general anesthesia is hard to bear. Cordy often has strange reactions to medications, and I don’t know which way she’ll react to what they give her.

I’ve had nightmares for days about something going wrong, then waking up in a full panic attack, trying to stop the tears. Were this Mira, I would not be as worried. Don’t get me wrong – I love Mira just as much, but she’s an amazingly tough kid. She’s never seemed as medically fragile as Cordy. Ha, I can’t believe I just called Cordy fragile. My Amazon warrior princess?

So spare a thought for Cordy in the morning, and hopefully I’ll be reporting that her surgery was quick, routine, and we’ll be home in time for her to watch Word World.