Hands

You can see part of my bandaid

 Its quiet. Very quiet. The only noise in the house is gently sucking, breathing, and cooing of the feeding newborn. It's the middle of the night and I'm doing what I do most nights at this time, answering to Lil E's feeding needs. As I sit in the nursery rocking back and forth in the glider holding my beautiful baby boy I tend to do a lot of thinking. There is no noise to drown out the thinking at this time of the night. Tonight I was thinking about my hands. Yes, Hands.
Today I decided it would be a good idea to try to open packaging with a knife instead of scissors. I'm clumsy so I should've known better. As I'm opening the packaging my wet hand (yes, yes, I know. I don’t need a lecture) slips and I stab the oh so sensitive spot between my thumb and pointer finger. I didn’t cut it...I stabbed it. It was such a beautifully clean stab that it took the pain a few seconds to reach my brain. But when it did, Oh GODS did it hurt! The throbbing in my hand has yet to cease. I didn’t realize how very useful certain parts of me were until I could no longer use them. Tonight it was my palm and my thumb on my left hand that I had no use of. Making a bottle and changing a dirty diaper in the middle of the night is extremely difficult with only 1 ½ hands...especially when the half I'm missing is the thumb.

*sigh*

As I'm thinking about the nagging, throbbing ache that is my left hand my mind turns to the history of my hands and all that they have done for me over the past twenty-something years.

Tiny baby hands

In the beginning my hands were carefree. They were for holding hands bigger then my own. They were for swinging on trees, making mud pies, throwing random objects at my sister, and squishing spaghetti between my little fingers. They were for dipping in finger paint, holding crayons, markers, chalk, and writing on walls.

Writing on walls soon turned into writing on paper. My hands became nimble and agile enough to write numbers, letters, words, sentences, and then paragraphs. They wrote math problems and stories. They painted pictures and made gluing art projects together a breeze.

Lil E's hands are so small

In more recent years my hands seem to have forgotten their carefree life. These are important hands with important jobs now. These hands of mine have a more noble duty. They are now used to hold bottles, binkies, burp rags, and babies. They chop, slice, dice, scoop, and stir countless family dinners. They fold laundry, do dishes, and scrub bathrooms. They pick up children when they fall down, brush off dirty little knees, and wipe away tears. My hands give loving caresses, pats of encouragement, and high fives for a job well done.

My hands have been bloodied and bruised, slammed and mangled, broken, misused and abused. Most of all my hands have been under-appreciated. But yesterday the amazing man in my life showed my hands they were appreciated and loved. Yesterday he recognized all the things these hands do for our family and in honor of that slipped a ring on this injured hand of mine.

It's so shiny!