a day of miracles

Today was a day of miracles.

It all started when another darling friend named Emily--not the one who gave us the hat--invited me out to lunch. I wanted to go, but I had some errands to do beforehand. I hadn't gotten ready for the day at all, so I ran upstairs to put on REAL clothes (as in, not sweat pants). While I was up there, I found my phone, which I had misplaced earlier. My nana was calling.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Allie, honey, I'm in trouble," she said. She had fallen down at the mall and cut open her head.

Fortunately, Jacque and I were on our way out to do the errand anyway, so I just finished getting dressed and the two of us and our little babies were on the way to the mall in minutes. A lady was standing outside the mall waiting for me. Jacque was able to take the car as I ran out and assessed the situation.

Nana was sitting against the door, surrounded by blood. She was sitting kind of strangely and at first I assumed she had broken her foot or something too. But no, her foot was fine, and just her head was bleeding.

Bleeding like crazy.

We got her to the car and drove off to her doctor. She hadn't lost consciousness, and she was well enough to direct me to the doctor. We got there a few minutes later, but the doctor was out to lunch. We called the answering service but they weren't able to get through to the doctor.

We were going to just stand there and wait, but we decided to walk back to the car. On the way, we ran into the receptionist. She had "randomly" decided to come back a half hour early for lunch. I guess she assessed my nana's wound and announced that they were not qualified to deal with the problem. So they sent us to the local walk-in clinic.

Where we walked in, only to have the nurse pull off the bandage on Nana's head and gasp. Audibly. No, not audibly: freakin loudly. "You're gonna need a plastic surgeon!!! We can't deal with this here! You need the ER!" she squeaked shrilly. I was about ready to throttle her. She tried to throw the bloody bandage back on to shield her eyes from the wound, but Nana held out her hand.

"STOP," she said, strangely regal and commanding. "I want my granddaughter to see it."

So I braced myself and had a good look.

It looked as though when she landed on her head, the skin just split. The gash was in the shape of a star, with visible bone in the center.

I'm looking at her skull, I thought.

"How bad is it, Allie? Can't they just fix it here?"

Skull. Skull.

"Uh, you know, it's not TOO bad, but we should probably go to the ER," I said, grateful that I have probably seen worse on my brother James. "This clinic looks lame. If I were you, I'd want a real surgeon to fix it."

Nana sighed, and while she was getting her head rewrapped I called Grampy and told him to meet us at the emergency room.

Now, this whole time, Jacque was in the car with our two babies--two babies under 15 weeks. Nathaniel HATES the car he will usually just scream forever and ever, but instead, he just slept. Another miracle. And Jacque, the hero of the day, was able to take the car so I could just get out with Nana everywhere we went. It was amazing.

Also, even though my car wasn't totally empty in the morning, I felt like I should fill it on up (yet another divine intervention, I'm sure). We didn't have to worry about gas at all.

We went to the ER and got all checked in, and my mom and grandpa met us there. Carl was able to get off work early to help Grampy give Nana a blessing, and Jacque stayed with me while I went home to care for James.

At this point, the missionaries showed up at my mom's house! I'd left them a voicemail asking them to come to the ER to bless my nana, but they came to the house instead--and just in time. They got James off the bus for me and carried him from his wheelchair to the hospital bed in our living room.

Then hospice showed up, along with everyone from the ER, including Nana. She needed 30 stitches right on her eyebrow. Ow. But she was fine.

Basically, that is the long story of what happened. It felt like the whole day was set up from the beginning to handle my nana's fall. Everyone was in the right places at the right time to handle it all. The whole day I just felt so completely that God was watching us and making everything work out.

Other miracles that happened:

- Carl had a dental appt for later in the evening so he was already planning to come home early (unusual for him)

- We were uncrowded in the ER waiting room we went to

And I believe there are more but I can't think of them at this time. But let's just say, it was a day of miracles.

random miracle story

No, this is not about the miracle of birth. X.x;; My midwife mentioned that for 6 out of 7 people, the castor oil works--and for the 7th person, it just makes them really sick and doesn't work. I am apparently the 7th kind of person.

Anyway. The other day, I was a little bugged because I was running out of checks. Paying bills is a little hard without those guys, and I knew we had at least 2 more pads of them around SOMEWHERE in this house. Somewhere. And I couldn't find them anywhere.

So in the morning, I prayed that my checks would just be sent to me and it would be great.

Well, then in the evening Carl got home and wanted to play a game. So we played Guess Who for a while. When we were done, we had to find a place for it to live, since it was a new game and we hadn't found it a home yet.

I suggested that he maybe put it in this one random drawer I saw. And then, lo and behold, he decided that would be a dumb place for the game--but there were the checks! So he picked them up and gave them to me. My missing checks had randomly been sent to me. By my darling husband from across the room.

Prayer is awesome, guys.

Keep praying that this kid decides to be born already. :^/