Gracie, Abbie & I stopped by our storage unit yesterday to pick up a few of the baby toys for Abbie, hoping that new toys might assuage her current fascination with eating dirty shoes.  Abbie was sacked out in her car seat, worn out from a long day at daycare.  Gracie, though, was wide awake - her brain obviously in overdrive.  I opened the van door on her side so she could see me while I braved the cavernous depths of the storage unit and then sat down to change into my tennis shoes - you don't dare enter our unit with open-toed low-heel sandals.  In fact, it's probably not a good idea to enter without a hazmat suit....Gracie said, "Mommy, be careful and watch out for cars!"  Ummm, okay - 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon in the 5 MPH speed zone of the storage farm is not exactly high risk for being assaulted by a hit and run driver.  But, I told her that I would be careful.  Then, she said, "Mommy, please don't get blown up, okay?  'Cause if you blow up, I won't have another mama and then I would be sad."  Then, she put her little fists up to her eyes and pretended to wipe away imaginary tears.  I promised her that I would do my level best to not get blown up.  I'm not sure where she came up with this scenario, but I do suspect that it's a kind of natural progression for a child her age to start worrying that her parents might not always be around.  Which, of course, has me thinking..........

You know for the last three and a half years, I have spent at least a portion of my time consumed with worry that something would happen to Gracie (and the last year the same worry has filled my heart at times about Abbie) - that she'd contract some terrible illness or have a horrible accident.  Truthfully, I haven't spent too much time worrying about my own health or accident risk.  Aside from my OB-GYN making his "we could have lost the baby, or even worse, Daphne" comment when Abigail was born or the ENT saying, almost as an aside, "well you could have a brain tumor" when he confirmed my severe one-sided hearing loss, I really haven't thought much about my own mortality...That's not to say that I think I'm immortal, it's just been that, until the last few months or so,   the girls haven't really been old enough to care if something happened to me - so I haven't really worried about the absence of me would effect them.   They were young enough that if I suddenly disappeared from their lives, within a few months, they would probably have forgotten all about me.  I don't say that with any kind of self-pity - it's just a statment of fact.  Abbie is still at this point - if someone else were to appear on the scene, cuddle her 20 hours a day, and feed her breastmilk from the source on demand, she'd be just fine.  Gracie is old enough now, though, that she would remember.  This fills my heart with a kind of love that's almost indescribable.  Certainly, there are many people in this world who would be saddened if I wasn't in it, but there is just something about her saying, "I won't have another mama" that makes me realize, yet again, that whatver else I am to other people in the world, I am the only mama that Gracie and Abbie have.  Which got me thinking, I better shape up and take better care of myself.  Maybe I should pass on the second helping of cookies and opt for that broccoli.  And maybe I should be more conscientious about putting on my seat belt before I start the car, instead of two miles down the road.  Maybe I should worry less and smile more.  Yeah, that's what I'm going to do - I'm going to do that for my girls.....because for so long I've worried about how I'd feel if something happened to them....now I need to be thinking about how they'd feel if something happened to me.  And besides, who wouldn't do anything they possibly could to protect this sweet little face?


All seriousness aside, I did find the toys.  Steve cleaned them up and Abigail played with them.  For a little while.  And then promptly went back to chewing on Gracie's dirty shoes....

Here's a video of her.....yep, I actually videod her putting a dirty shoe in her mouth.  Things are a lot different with the second child:

What A Croc