Before and After

I feel like we now live our life with the titles, "before Chloe's accident" and "after Chloe's accident". I know it probably won't be that way forever, but that's just how it feels right now.

My life has been changed. To have a glimpse of how bad something could be and to have it turn around for good makes you evaluate everything in your life.

The biggest thing that I have evaluated was how I am a mother.

"Before Chloe's accident," I would say that I was a good mother. I loved my kids more than any other. I will say though that if laundry needed to get done, I probably would have chosen to do that over playing a game of Candy Land with the kids, cause I NEEDED to get the laundry done, or if dinner needed to get made and the kids wanted me to push them on the swing, I chose dinner, cause it HAD to get done. You get the idea...

When I first got the call from Ryan about Chloe's accident, I immediately started to blame myself. You see, the night of the accident, she was begging me SOOOO bad to come with me to cards {man, do I wish I took her with me!}. I told her I was going to go upstairs and get ready, and she said she was going to come up with me so she could spend more time with me. While we were upstairs, she started whining about wanting to come with me. I told her in a stern voice that it was for mommy only, and although I wanted her to stay in the bathroom with me, I didn't want her to whine at me about going. She stayed with me, but still pouted about not being able to go. Before leaving she couldn't kiss me enough. I'm so thankful I had that memory of not rushing her and just letting her kiss me and then come back and kiss me again!;)

While she was laying in her bed in the hospital, on a ventilator, in a drug-induced coma, I had the awful memory of a conversation we had earlier that morning. I can't remember the whole thing in detail, but I do remember telling Chloe that the way she was talking to me was very ugly, and I didn't like it. She started to cry, and said, "I'm not ugly!!" Of course, I explained to her that I wasn't calling her ugly, but the way she was speaking was ugly. Now, when I really sit and think about that conversation, I was just being a mother and correcting the way her attitude was. But during the time that she was completely incoherent, all I could do was call her pretty. I had mentioned this to my friends, and they said they totally noticed I kept calling her pretty in the hospital, but had no idea why I was doing that. I just was feeling so bad about that conversation.

Now that Chloe is feeling much better and up and about, I am letting the dust bunnies form in the corners of my woodwork, and enjoying my kids. If they want to paint - I'll paint...if they want to play Battleship - I'll play Battleship. I realized this past Saturday while I was dusting my living room that the last time I dusted was the morning of the accident, and you know what? Who cares!?!?! I'm gonna live each day to the fullest!

I say all of this, to tell you that this accident has opened my eyes about how I mother my children. You never know what can happen on any given day, hour, minute for that matter. Life is precious...enjoy every minute of it - even the tough times.