Last night we threw a wedding shower for our friend Josh and his fiance Heather at the church. Josh has been our youth pastor for the last year and is now moving on to get married and then go to Bible school. He’s leaving town next week. The shower was just wrapping up when we heard Eden’s blood curdling scream from the next room. The kids had been playing in one of the classrooms and somehow Eden fell and busted up her nose on the Lego table.

Jim went to get her and as I saw him walk by with her I noticed the blood gushing out of her nose. We cleaned her up in the bathroom when we realized that it was cut pretty deep in two places. We decided to take her to the ER for stitches. My mom met us at the hospital to take Honor, because there’s NO way we could have contained him there (good LORD!) and the waiting game began.

As we went through the check in process, we had to endure the many judgmental questions about our waiting to immunize. Because, you know, we’re waiting because we hate our children and want to do the worst possible thing for them. Sometimes the medical field can’t understand that they do more harm than good at times. And it’s frustrating to have to defend your parenting choices to everyone in the hospital.

She had x-rays, and luckily it’s not broken. She kept saying that she wanted to go back to the picture room. I think it was because she got to ride around on the hospital bed. And luckily it wasn’t deep enough to need stitches, the doctor just glued the cuts together. Eden said that they were going to “blue her nose.” Probably the worst part of the night for her was when she got her first shot ever, a tetanus shot. Poor kid, it was awful! And it made me glad that she hadn’t had to endure any other shots before.

I think the worst part of the night for me was when we got home and crawled into bed and I started processing the night. Of course the “what ifs” began running through my head. It is the worst imaginable thing in the world to even think about your child dying. How would I continue if I lost one of them? It fills me with panic to even think about it. It makes me want to lock them up in a padded room in the house and never let them near anything dangerous. But I can’t. I’ve got to let them face all of life’s dangers, take all of life’s risks. All I can do to protect them is trust God that he will keep them safe. Letting them go is the hardest part of being a parent and it’s the most inevitable. And I have to say, it kind of sucks.