Sylvia is a bundle of shy joy. Over the summer she has turned very bashful when it comes to a few certain things.
The first time she got to help me make chocolate chip cookies for Daddy. Just the two of us. It was so fun and so special. (This was also the day she nosedived into the back of their doll carrier and nearly split her head open.)
Mud and dirt. Those two words alone sum up Sylvia very well. She is happy to play outside in our dirt pile and a bonus is that I let her come inside and get water from the fridge to take back out and create mud. Most days she doesn't look like this, though!! This was after she had spent some time playing in a mud puddle. :)
Contentedness. She is a quiet, content girl much of the time. Content while playing in the dirt. Content while sitting and coloring (and she can color very well!). Content to just sit and snuggle on your "soulder" as she calls it. :)
I want to say a word about the this picture. Not only is it a beautiful picture of her, but this dress was a hand-me-down earlier this year and it is my very favorite dress to see her in. And her braids. Oh my, she is as cute as a button in 2 braids!!
A blurry picture of a cute moment. :)
This summer the girls attended Vacation Bible School for the first time. They loved it and this is Sylvia with her "Certificate" from VBS. It had been used for cutting practice before I got around to taking a picture. :)
Habits. Sylvia went through a phase of picking her nails. It felt like a never ending phase and her poor nails would be red and nearly bleeding most days. I didn't know what to do, friends didn't know what to do, and for a while putting bandage tape on her nails worked. Then she started picking the tape off. We gently and firmly reminded her all day, every day to not pick her nails (it was an unconscious thing she was doing) and we praised and cheered when she would have nails that hadn't been picked lately. Without any big hullabaloo she just eventually stopped picking her nails.
Putting things in her mouth is/was another habit that she seems to have. It isn't nearly as bad now, but for a while she put just about anything in her mouth. This picture is after she had put a black, dry-erase crayon in her mouth. It made quite the goatee! :)
She loves playing in water, but she's not a big fan of splashing and carrying on. Especially not GETTING splashed. We didn't use the kiddie pool as much as I thought we might this year because it was never long before there was a disagreement on how the water should be played with. :) She can be a quiet player, and when it comes to water that's how she likes it. She loved going to the lake this summer with my family. :)
Her blankie. This picture holds a thousand words that I can't begin to write. One word would be "beautiful."
Sylvia loves, loves, loves her baby sister. She has learned to be gentle with Charity and the gentleness shows in her actions towards her. She loves to give Charity hugs and kisses.
The next picture has quite the story. On a day that I had not showered and was wearing less than my nicest home clothes, we ended up taking an emergency trip to the doctors office. Sylvia was playing outside after lunch and put on a pair of boots that had been left outside. A spider had taken up residence in the boot and eventually bit Sylvia. She initially just fussed a bit while trying to take her boot off. I helped her get the boot off and saw the dead spider squashed on her foot right on top of the little, white, raised welt. I immediately saved the dead spider in a plastic cup and started applying Young Living Essential Oils to the bit to help remove the toxins and relieve any discomfort. She wasn't crying or anything and was acting totally normal. After making several phone calls and hurried texts, it was decided to be safe and go to the doctor.
En route, any time I could (stop signs, stop lights, etc.) I reached back and applied more essential oils to the bite. I didn't really think there was going to be any problem until about half way to the doctor's office she started having tremors in her hands. Not bad, but not normal. She still wasn't verbalizing any indicators that it was bothering her but I was watching her very closely. Since we were walk-in at the pediatrician's office we had to wait our turn. Which ended up being a 2.5 hour wait. During that time she went from normal to fussing to full-out crying. It was over her nap-time but even so it was completely uncharacteristic of her. She kept saying her foot hurt.
The doctor looked at her foot (which by now had a red area about the size of a tennis ball around the bite) and looked at the spider. She was convinced it was not a black widow spider and that the bite was harmless. However, Sylvia was sweating profusely and just crying and crying. Her walk was not steady, either. The doctor called in another doctor and they just observed Sylvia for a minute or two before deciding to send us to a pediatric urgent care center (thankfully on our way home) for observation.
It was 5pm and nobody had napped, Charity was not having the best of times and I had very full hands with everything going on. I desperately called Daniel and praise the Lord! he had just walked in the door at home. I begged him to please come meet us at KidMed to pick up Susannah and Charity. As we got into the car where Sylvia's blanket was, I knew that if her hysteria was from lack of sleep she would snuggle with her blankie and go to sleep. She snuggled her blankie and would be quiet for a tiny bit then she would scream. Literally scream. And then cry. She did that the whole 10 minutes from the Doctors office to the urgent care.
Once we got into our room at KidMed I was hoping someone would finally take us seriously that something was simply not right. (And I don't say that to mean that the doctors we saw at the ped's office didn't; my mama gut just didn't think it was "nothing".) Again the doctor was convinced it was not a black widow spider (I had the spider with me, dead, in a little container). As I was able, I was frantically searching the web on my tiny phone and texting with my sister who was on her computer, trying to find out information on the looks, markings and lack of markings on black widows.
All the while Sylvia was continuing her screaming and crying. Each time she screamed I would ask "what's the matter?" and she would cry and cry and say "well, um, my foot hurts!" They tried various distractions for the first hour: the TV (she asked me to turn it off), a Popsicle - she nibbled a few bites and didn't want any more, crackers - she ate maybe half a dozen and didn't want the rest. They finally tried some numbing cream. 45 minutes later they gave her some Motrin. An hour later they gave her liquid Prednisone. Another hour passed with no change in Sylvia's behavior and they decided to give her some morphine. By this time she was physically EXHAUSTED (no small wonder). We had to move to a different room for the IV so we did that.
Then I had to put her on the table to get her IV. It took the nurse forever to find a vein (I'm sure not having drank anything all afternoon didn't help) and then it blew. She called in another nurse who chose a vein further up her arm and got it the first try. By this time Sylvia was all but asleep. I was loosely holding her legs and body, and another nurse holding her hand but she had no fight left in her. She screamed when they put the needle in and immediately fell asleep. Knowing we were finally headed in the direction of relief for her, I was glad to go through it all.
Once the IV was in place I crawled up on the bed and held her. It was the most uncomfortable way for me to hold her but my mama heart wouldn't let it be any other way. Then the IV pump wasn't working and the nurse fiddled with it for probably 15 minutes before another nurse decided to just let the IV gravity drip instead of being pumped. It took 30 minutes to run in and just as it was finished she woke up. She just laid there and I asked her how her foot felt. She sat up and chirped "It's all better!" It took a few minutes for us to get checked out and on our way home. She drank the rest of her juice and finished off her crackers. When we got home (at 9:30pm, having left the house at 2pm) Daniel had supper heated up for both of us. By this time Sylvia was a combination of sleep and drug drunk. Her walk was wobbly and her speech very lazy. She ate a few bites of supper and was zoned out. We tucked her into bed and put the baby monitor in her room. She woke up twice, I think, crying about her foot. Tylenol and more of the numbing cream got us through the night. She complained about it hurting for a few more days, and we gave her Tylenol as needed and used the numbing cream often (she said it helped).
I did a lot of digging around on the internet and finally found that there are FALSE black widow spiders. There are 125 different species that are knows as False Black Widows, and the one picture matched our spider exactly. It said the bite is not very poisonous but extremely painful. Now I know and am glad to finally have an answer! Sylvia has a respectful fear of spiders now, and knows to not put on any shoes or boots that are outside.
******* End of the Spider Story *******
Sylvia loves to watch and be a part of whatever I'm doing in the kitchen... or just about anywhere, really. :) In this picture I was preparing squash to make into baby food. She took one of the pieces and put toothpicks in it for a "birthday cake."
I found this in my phone pictures. It's from early summer. I had put Charity on the couch for a minute while I did something and when I got back I saw this. :) Sylvia loves, loves, loves Charity. She will tell anyone and everyone "her name is Charity. Charity Kathleen!" It comes out as "Chawity Kaffween".
Many of Sylvia's Ls come out as W, and her Rs are non-existent if they are in the middle of a word. It is interesting to hear her pronunciation of words. "World" comes out "wihld" (short vowel-sound i); Car - Cah; Morning - Moaning; Blankie - Bvankie; Grandma - Bvamma. She must've recently grown just enough to be able to see out the side windows of the car; when we pass cow fields and there are a bunch of cows, she says "WOOKWOOKWOOOOOK MAMA!! COWS!!" The first time she said it I was wondering what in the world had her so excited. :)
She loves to snuggle and to be rocked. She LOVES to sing (but will often stop if we start singing with her); Great Is Thy Faithfulness is what she sings the most right now. Anyone and everyone that she thinks may be remotely interested she will tell them that she is 2 and hold up two fingers. :)
This is a little glimpse into our world with Sylvia over the summer. We love her bunches and bunches.
