I think I'm one step closer to that coveted Mother of the Year Award

The last two weeks have been very hectic here. We finally got everything moved out of the rental house and moved over to our house. Our garage is total chaos now. We have so many boxes to go through and we have a huge stack of garage sale material to get rid of.

The house is wonderful but there have been a few minor glitches. For starters, when we hooked up our washing machine something fell down into one of the pipes which caused a huge backup of water that flooded part of the house. Good thing we have mostly tile floors. It made for an easy cleanup.

Secondly, when the furniture store delivered our new couches the guys bringing them in accidentally took a big chunk out of one wall that had to be repaired.

Lastly, our kitchen island was installed crooked. I knew something was funny inside the house before we moved in, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. Once we got the furniture inside it was like a big, red arrow was pointing to the island saying "CROOKED!"

So, anyhow the last week was filled with repairman after repairman coming into the house. It has been crazy.

On Tuesday I decided to skip my Bible study to keep the kids home while we waited for the carpenter to come fix the crooked island. Also, when we were at church Sunday both kids had complete meltdowns that resulted in me carrying a kicking, screaming Jake out to the car while his Sunday school teacher pushed a completely irate Emma in her stroller to the car for me. That little episode resulted in me almost losing my skirt in the church parking lot because of the kicking, squirming toddler. Needless to say, I thought staying home on Tuesday would be the best thing for everyone involved.

However, it turns out we should have been in church. Maybe then we could have avoided the trip to the ER. That afternoon as I was giving Emma her bottle before putting her down for a nap I noticed something we don't experience here often. Silence. Total silence. I immediately picked Emma up to go find Jake. Not five second later I hear him screaming and crying. He came out of our bedroom clutching at his mouth and throat. I asked him to show me what he had done so he took me in the bedroom and pointed to our bed with an overturned bottle of rubbing alcohol on it. I really didn't feel like he could have ingested much of it just because it would have tasted so bad and because the bottle still looked pretty much at the level it had started at. But he was so upset and looked like he was hurting so much that I got worried and decided to call poison control. Too bad the number for poison control was still packed away in one of my boxes. I ended up calling Amy to see if she knew the number and she suggested I call his doctor. After many phone calls I got hooked up with poison control and talked to a professional. She didn't seem that worried about it either. She just said to give him something sweet to drink, watch him and if he threw up more than twice or acted drunk I would need to take him to the ER.

We sat on the couch together while he drank a juice box and kept trying to fall asleep. I was worried about the sleepiness because that sounds like acting drunk to me so I decided to conduct my own little field sobriety test. I asked him if he could walk. He said yes. He got down off the couch, took three stumbling steps, and fell flat on his face. On our wonderfully easy to clean tile floors. He seriously got the biggest goose egg on his forehead that I've ever seen. I felt so awful. Not only had I contributed to my sons first (hopefully last) bout with drunkenness but I also had now helped him get a serious head injury.

We went straight to the ER. Well, we went to the ER after I called Amy in a panic and asked her to come watch Emma who was by now asleep in her crib. She said she would be here as soon as she could but she was about thirty minutes away. I was really worried about Jake so I went in search of a neighbor who could come stay with Emma until Amy arrived. I'm not kidding you that I went outside with Jake in my arms and found the first (and only) person out in the street. It was a man I had just met the night before although Mike has talked to him several times. I knew he was a Baptist preacher with three kids so I figured he would be okay. I'm sure he thinks I'm crazy now. However, he did graciously come over and stayed with Emma until help arrived.

When we got to the ER the doctor seemed to think Jake's bump on the head was more serious than the alcohol ingestion so they did a cat scan. We stayed there for about four hours of observation while Jake came out of his drunken state. I'm still wondering what Sponge Bob Squarepants looks like to a drunk two year old. I'm sure we'll be paying for therapy for that later in life. The cat scan came back normal and he is doing fine now. He slept from 6pm to 5:30 the next morning. When he woke up he came into our room and crawled in bed with me. The first thing he asked for was some crackers. As we lay there together I kept getting whiffs of alcohol smell. I think it was coming out of his pores. I got him up, gave him a bath, watched him poop in the bathtub and didn't even care. I was just so happy to have a safe little boy back home with me. Through the whole experience just when panic was about to set in I kept having two thoughts. The first one was that I was sorry I had been so mean to Jake (and vice versa) that morning. He had been in time out three or four times already. The second was a voice saying "Be still and know that I am God." When I began to get panicked about leaving Emma with a near stranger I heard "Be still and know that I am God." When I began to worry that Jake might be in serious condition I heard "Be still and know that I am God." When I realized that I had to get to an emergency room fifteen or twenty miles away in a car that had been on empty for a day already "Be still and know that I am God." Looks like I got my Bible study after all.