Outside the bubble

This past week, I've been rethinking a lot of things in my life.  Mainly telling myself not to take things for granted, and to also admit when you're wrong.  Both of these actions have required a lot of tears on my part.  All week I've been obsessing about baby Aria.  She has a group on facebook Prayers for Baby Aria and I can't help but check it multiple times a day.  She is a three month old baby who was involved in a horrible car accident last week.  Her carseat became detached from it's base when their car was hit, and was showing symptoms of severe shaken baby syndrome.  She had a massive stroke on the right side of her brain, and wasn't given a very good prognosis.  Each daily improvment she made, i.e. showing her gag reflex, reacting to someone tickling the bottom of her foot, blinking, moving her arms and legs, pooping and peeing.  As I read her daily updates and read about her progressing, albeit slowly, I couldn't help but appreciate the fact that Payton is a healthy baby.  I couldn't begin to understand the impatient feeling of waiting to find out what the MRI or CT scan said whether or not my baby was going to survive.  After I would read each update, I would start bawling and just hold my baby cherishing every moment I have with her, and that everything she's doing right now is a major accoplishment.  Thank God baby Aria is going to survive.  It's unknown what her disabilities will be, or how severe they will be, but she has already defied the odds.  *Note* if anyone is wanting to donate money to Aria and her family, there has been an account set up at Union Bank in David City.  It explains this on the facebook page mentioned above as well as on her CaringBridge website.

Along with baby Aria, I've also been keeping tabs on a friend I've known since kindergarten.  It was learned that her mom died this week.  Another friend losing their mother within a two and a half month time span, what the heck is going on?!  What exactly determines a persons "time to go" so to speak?  Is it God?  Is it the way a person lives their life?  Both?  I used to be horribly afraid of dying.  Not to the point to where I would have night terrors about it, but enough that it would give me awful anxiety whenever I would think about it.  I just couldn't bear the thought of leaving all of my loved ones, and how guilty I would feel for leaving them.  I've learned to deal with it a little bit better, after all, it may be out of my control.  But now that I have a child of my own I can't stand the thought.  I hate the stories of parents dying and leaving a small child, especially an infant behind.  I damn near burst into tears everytime I read a story like that.  I attribute these types of emotional outbursts to becoming a mom.  Sure I would be sad whenever reading a story like this, but not to the point to where I felt genuine concern and sorrow for the family affected. 

Both of these occurrances have made me stop to realize how petty some of the crap we experience in our daily lives is exactly that, petty.  All in all, does it really matter if you or your spouse didn't get the dishes done and the dishwasher has to be started in the morning rather than the night before?  Does it really matter that the bathroom didn't get cleaned right at that moment, the lawn didn't get mowed or the trash taken out?  In case you were wondering, the answer to all of these is no.  There are far more important things to worry about and do, such as spending time with our child and not miss a moment of her growing up.  Making sure she has everything she needs to survive from material goods for her development, to emotional and physical support.  Or knowing that I have some of the best friends I could ask for, knowing that they're going to tell me what I need to hear and not what I want to hear.  And if the result of hearing something I don't want to is me rethinking the way that I mentally process things, then good!  It means that they've done their job.  Life is too precious to waste, especially when children are involved.  Cherish it all, whether you're a parent, or childless because one day you'll look back and be sorry you didn't.