How not to get the Angelina Jolie look

At 12:04 this morning, when the house was dark and quiet, I heard the kiddo's door open. As usual, I went from soundly asleep to wiiiiide awake (the kiddo rarely gets up in the middle of the night) and bolted into the hall to see why she was up. Turns out she was thirsty, so I sent her back to bed and fetched her a cup of water from the bathroom. When she finished it, she asked me to snuggle her, so I climbed in bed with her to cuddle until she fell back asleep.

I love cuddling the kiddo, especially now that she's too big to hold the way I could when she was a baby. I was dozing off to sleep again myself when BAM! Kiddo's head jerked back all of a sudden, catching me right smack-dab in the upper lip.

OWWWWWWWWWWWW!!! I screamed (on the inside - it was the middle of the night, after all). Aloud, I just whispered quietly to the kiddo that I had to go. She was mostly asleep again by that point, so there were no objections. I stumbled (without my glasses and with the nightlight in the bathroom burnt out, so in much darker dark than usual) into the bathroom to survey the damage. Squinting at myself in the mirror, the injury didn't look too bad. I opted to skip going downstairs for ice and instead rinsed out my mouth with water (my lip got cut a bit on my teeth - Kiddo has one hard skull!) and went back to sleep.

When I woke up this morning, I could see the damage much more clearly (having my glasses on also helped). Besides the fact that it was hurting, I had a sort of Angelina Jolie thing going on in my upper lip region. I tried ice and Advil - which did bring the swelling down - and then I tried Listerine to cauterize and numb the cut area on the inside. For the record, you should NEVER try to swish with Listerine when you have an open mouth wound. OWWWWWWWWWW!!! I yelped once more - again inside my head, because I didn't want Hubby to know the brilliance of my Listerine plan. (Hey, it seemed like a good theory at the time - kind of like using peroxide on a cut, you know? I figured it would sting a bit, as Listerine does because, you know, it's Listerine..., but then it would feel better. Um, no.)

My upper lip injury wouldn't have been quite as big a deal if I hadn't been signed up to sing a solo in church this morning. I was a little worried that the cut would really bother me when I was trying to sing. I also wound up serving as worship leader this morning, which meant reading a nice, long passage from the Bible immediately before singing. (It also meant doing the opening prayer, which I did off the top of my head and which I fear may've sounded a bit like Ben Stiller saying grace in Meet the Parents...



Okay, it wasn't quite that awkward, but it sure wasn't eloquent!)

At any rate, the song went okay. (Once again, I was glad that our choir director/accompanist is one of those people who is able to transpose keys in his head and whip up an accompaniment out of thin air, because that meant I could sing the song - Through it All, an oldie but goodie - without having to go into my head voice once. I definitely prefer taking the easy way out and staying down in alto-tenor range whenever I can!) By the time church was over, my lip was really hurting, so I'm going to hit the Advil bottle again shortly.

By the by, this is not the first time I've been conked in the face by the kiddo's skull. This wasn't even my first fat lip caused in this manner. (The worst Kiddo-Noggin-Conking injury I incurred sent me to the urgent care clinic to check for a broken nose. It wasn't broken, but it did re-deviate my septum, which has led to fewer sinus infections in the winter ever since, so: woo!) Hubby thinks it is all my own fault because I will roughhouse with the kiddo (SPD major sensory seeker = a kid who loves to play rough) and nine times out of ten, this is how my skull-on-face injuries occur. (Okay, I'll further 'fess up that at bedtime last night, the kiddo also bonked me in the face, but that wasn't nearly as bad as the middle-of-the-night hit - more of an "ow" than an "OWWWW" type bump. So, yeah, it actually was a two-fer that gave me my aching, Angelina lip by morning.)

I think I need some ice cream. For medicinal purposes, of course - to help relieve the pain and swelling. Yep, definitely LOTS of ice cream, and no more Listerine...