The heating and plumbing guys came today to fix the sink and hot water heater. Unlike the electricians, they were friendly, respectful and efficient. Example: Electric men take hours out of two separate days to stomp through the house while the baby is asleep and wake her up, stare rudely at me when I say good morning, and yell at each other from different floors of the house while slamming the occasional door. Heating/plumbing men make polite small talk, compliment my child (although calling her a "nice little fella" didn't win any major points, especially after I made a point of calling her by her name), fixed all three problems in an hour, and didn't turn up their noses at the piles and piles of dirty dishes that resulted from no running water for nearly a week.
When they left, I decided to take a shower with Lilah. We went to the doctor's yesterday for some rashes and blisters, and Lilah was diagnosed with very mild eczema. I was relieved. We're treating it with bathing only twice a week (bathing her, that is. We're continuing to bath regularly), olive oil in her bath, only organic lotions and soaps, and Bactraban ointment on any blister or open area to prevent infection. Our bathroom is located off our bedroom, so as usual, I places Lilah on our bed, surrounded her on all sides with large pillows, gave her a toy, and went to fill her baby tub and start the shower at an appropriate temperature. I sat on the toilet seat while it's filling so I could keep an eye on her, as usual. When her tub was half full, I leaned forward and added a cap full of EVOO and as I did so, I heard a very ominous thud. I believe expletives were the only coherent things running through my brain and I'm fairly sure I teleported the three feet out the bathroom to the floor where my child was lying face down on the floor, screaming. I picked her up to assess the damage, which included another bruise to her forehead (she conveniently pitched herself headfirst into Dano's computer while on the selfsame offending bed not a week ago; I yelled at my husband for not being more careful with the baby, as he had let her play on the bed with him in the presence of a deadly laptop), and a rugburn-esque abrasion to her right eye which was bleeding on both bony prominences above and below her eye, leaving her actual eye-socket remarkably unscathed. Being a nurse and an idiot, I promptly started doing "neuros" on her. At work, whenever any of the residents' falls happen to include a bump on the head, we do neuros every 15 minutes for an hour, every hour for 4 hours, every 4 hours for a shift, and then once a shift for 2 days. We check equal pupil reactivity and size, proper pain response, blurred vision, slurred speech, equal movement and reflexes to extremities, any numbness or tingling, and change in mentation. I, in my infinite wisdom (i.e. panic), attempted assess these things on a scared, screaming, bleeding 7 1/2 month old before giving up (since she was, for some reason, unable to tell me if her vision was blurred or had any numbness and her eyes were closed). She calmed relatively quickly and I stopped acting like an idiot and did an age-appropriate assessment on her. Her battle wounds were uglier than they were serious with a swollen, red scrape near her eye and matching bruises on her forehead - one green and old and one purple and new. Her screams subsided to hiccupy gasps, and I decided to proceed with the shower.
We stepped in, and I plopped her in her tub. The wisest would have foreseen the folly of placing a child in a tub full of water and...wait for it...oil. Under the water she slid, and my arms shot in after her to haul her up, sputtering and (again) screaming. Sure the neighbors were on the verge of calling CPS, I soothed her as best I could, assuring her I wouldn't let her drown, crawl off the bed, concuss herself, or bleed again. Today. It took a little longer the second time around before I could put her down again. I dumped all but a 1/2 inch of water out of her tub and sat her in it again before starting to wash my hair.
It was at this point I noticed the shower floor was filling with water and, after a closer inspection, realized there was a Bandaid stuck in the drain. I leaned down to pull it out and while I was leaning down, heard a gasping/sputtering/trying-really-hard-to-cry-but-can't sound and glanced over at the baby. Lilah's moronic mother hadn't given a thought to what would happen to the spray of water from the shower head if she weren't standing in it anymore and leaned down to unclog the drain. If she had, she would have realized it would pretty much catch Lilah full in the face, who was in her poor little tub and unable to escape. At this point, I was terrified of killing her if she spent another hour in my care, so I hauled her out of the tub, turned off the water, and called it a day. I dried and dressed her, not even bothering to comb her hair before she fell asleep, exhausted from her ordeal(s). I called Dano to tell him to come home and rescue his daughter as soon as he could, or he might not have a daughter to come home to.
I went downstairs to collect myself and had a French candy shaped like a log made out of dark chocolate and filled with milk chocolate fluffing. And it was good.
