When we were finally able to bring the twins home from the hospital, I was a nervous wreck. Only 2 nights before they came home, Timothy began to DSAT so low that he turned blue. The doctors immediately put him back on oxygen, and he ended up coming home on O2. I can remember watching him all night long just to make sure he didn’t stop breathing.

Making sure that the twins maintained their weight, their eyes stayed free of infection, and that they were able to take all of their feeds and keep them down were a few of the things that I focused on.

Never ever did it cross my mind that I should be concerned with Erin losing a toe, but it almost happened. About 2 months after Timmy and Erin had settled in, we were getting ready for one of our very first outings. Erin had a blow out, so I decided to rinse her off. At the end of her bath, I gently ran my hand over her tiny foot and stroked her toes when I noticed something didn’t seem right. As I tried to push my index finger between two of her toes, I realized that a piece of my hair had become intertwined and started to cut of her circulation. I quickly called John over to help me try and remove it. We worked for 20 minutes and finally felt confident that we had remove it completely. Poor little Erin Layne’s toe was bleeding and the hair left a deep indented ring around her entire toe. We kept a close eye on it for the next few days to make sure the cut didn’t get infected.

Over the next week, I thought about what I could have done to prevent it, or what would have happened if I hadn’t found it when I did. Erin had just gotten a bath the night before, and she was wearing footy pajamas. How could a single piece of hair have become so tightly wrapped around her toes?

I still find myself checking each of the kids’ toes anytime they sit in my lap or I put on their shoes. This incident was a simple reminder parenting isn’t always about the obvious. It wasn’t Timmy’s O2 or Erin’s persistent eye infection that caused any issues. It was one single strand of my hair, something so small that it was almost invisible.

THE END…

#loveyoulikepeaches