Remember When ↠ l.p.

A bed, a child, and one day.

Cailyn naps for another half hour or so and I'm content to keep still and watch her sleeping. When she does wake up I'm faced with the dilemma of what to do to keep her busy. While she can sit still and listen to me reading or watch several movies in a row now that she's older and can focus on things for longer, that doesn't help me when I'm in a hospital room. I'm sure if I were mobile and had toys from the house here with me, I could have kept her busy for the majority of the day. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to have mother bring me a book or some toys when she dropped of Cailyn. 

So instead I'm left to try to come up with inventive little games that we can play while still in the room and, in my case, still in bed. We play an incredibly short-lived game of hide and seek, where Cailyn would run and hide somewhere in the room while I counted, because there are only a few places to hide in a nearly bare, small hospital room. 

I try to entertain her with the cartoons that are on, but apparently Nick Jr. and Disney's kiddie shows are little bit too young for her. This is what I get for letting the girls watch mainly pixar, barbie and Disney princess movies with a lot of dialogue. Finally I manage to get her to agree to watching Spongebob (how long has that show been around for anyway? Nearly twenty years or something like that, it seems) while I call for the nurse to see if there are any sort of toys I can borrow from the children's ward or something like that. 

Julia is a very accommodating nurse and understands perfectly how active kids are, she says she has a little boy who is only slightly older than Cailyn. She manages to find a pack of Disney cards, some stuff toyed animals that no one will miss and a board game I've never heard of before today. She discretely hands them off to me while Cailyn is distracted by the TV. I want to keep her focused on one thing for as long as I possibly can before we move onto some other activity. If worst comes to worst, I reason, I can always pull up a book on my phone and read that to her. Or even start telling her a story I've made up on my own. My mother used to do that when we would drive out a little ways to visit my grandmother, maybe once every two weeks. As we drove, she would add a new scene or development to a story she'd made up about a prince and kids he would help escape from some sort of bad situation. I don't even remember what it was now, but it was brilliant at the time.

I thought it was amazing and exciting. It made the hour or so on the road bearable and interesting, especially when it was too dark to watch the world fly by out the window or look at my picture book. Surely I could do the same for Cailyn, right?

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Wrong.

I was so wrong. Two hours later, we've exhausted ourselves with cards and the board game and playing make believe with the plush animals. There's nothing on the TV that Cailyn feels like watching and I'm very tired. I'm achy and tired, but not in any pain. Which is lucky as Cailyn has been up and down from my bed and laid all over me. In fact Julia came in and almost got mad when she saw that Cailyn was laying on my stomach and yes, over my scraped side, but it wasn't hurting. She told me I couldn't let her do that, even if it didn't really hurt because it might pull out the stitches. 

Well I didn't know that it would pull out the stitches or that I had gotten stitches. Maybe they mentioned it when I had woken up before I forgot that I woke up? Confusing, I know. Despite the fact that I've had my wounds cleaned and bandaged again a few times, I haven't really watched what the nurses were doing when they unwrapped my injuries.  I didn't want to see how good or bad I was healing. I don't have a problem with blood really, just my blood. I made Cailyn look away or tried to distract both of us when my bandages had to be changed.

It only worked partially as have most of my other attempts. I tried the storytelling idea, but mother must have had a better imagination than I do or more time on her hands to come up with a solid idea. Cailyn labeled all of my plot ideas as either boring or silly. I'm almost at a loss of what to do with her. It's something that hasn't happened very often, I think I'm a good mom and good at finding things that she's interested in. Today, I just feel like a failure though. I can't take Tessie to go see Liam and now I can't keep my own daughter from being bored!

It might be the whole hospital and sickness vibe that's throwing me off and making me feel weaker (or my injuries or any number of things, really) but I feel a bit helpless today. I don't like it.