As most of you know, I gave birth to our second child, 3 weeks ago today. Our eldest daughter is 19 months old and we were naturally concerned with how she would react to having a sibling. And we had a home birth, with her present, to boot! And yet through it all, she has been a peach. Love, love, loves her baby sister. Is so gentle and kind. It just melts my heart.

And then, it all went a bit pear shaped.

Our wee babe was just 6 days old when we decided to take our first proper family outing, to Aldi & Trader Joe's (naturally!). We were at the door ready to leave...and my munchkin grabbed ahold of the door frame, so that when I opened the door, it kind of crushed her thumb. She was instantly hysterical, something we've never seen before. The nail turned black straight away, but it quickly started to bleed, which relieved a lot of the pressure under the nail. We stopped the bleeding, iced it a bit, gave loads of kisses and cuddles, and were ready to stay home on the sofa with a little heart-healing Scooby Doo. But she wouldn't have it. All she wanted to do was go to the store. So, we hesitantly loaded everyone up in the car, scrapped the trip to the north side and decided to go to a local produce shop a few blocks over instead. She whimpered, but she was a trooper, and we made it home with little incident.

But here's the catch. Our munchkin is a thumb sucker. Only that thumb. And we had no idea how an injury to THE thumb could cause total upheaval. Giving birth to a child, that was easy peasy. Having our toddler lose her main form of self-soothing and comfort, utter devastation! She's always sucked her thumb to sleep, so putting her down for naps & nighttime were long drawn out cry fests. And if she awoke during the night, she didn't know how to go back to sleep without her thumb, so she'd wake up fully for more crying. And then sometimes she'd try to pop her thumb in her mouth and take it out crying. I think the pressure of sucking would really intensify the pain. My poor little child. :(

So, now we're two weeks post-injury. And we're doing better. We've had 3 days of incident free sleeping. Huzzah! We've cut off most of the nail that had been pulling away from her thumb, but I think she'll eventually lose the whole thing. She does suck it in her sleep now, but not during the day - and not to go to sleep.

I've always wondered how and when we'd go about breaking this habit. Needless to say, this is not what I had in mind!