Normally when my babies are upset, I do not reach for my camera. As it was today, however, I already had the camera in my hand (what is it about life with Littles that just makes it so hard to follow one path, one plan in one direction for more than five seconds?). I decided that there are just as many stories in the tears as there are the smiles, so I started snapping photos of what turned out to be, for poor Mr. HD, a rather traumatic event….

It was an absolutely beautiful sunny day here, so we spent pretty much the entire afternoon in the backyard. Absolutely beautiful. I got to do a little reading, the kids got to do a lot of playing, and we even got to take a smoothie/frappe break mid-afternoon. Everyone was feeling good and we were taking pictures of all us in our (rather wild, rather varied) sun hats. But then, just like that, Harrison dropped his hat, started howling, and threw his hands up to his eyes where they stayed for many, many minutes as we tried to figure out what was wrong. As it turns out, when your babies have the most beautiful, long eyelashes….

…they can cause some less than beautiful moments. Really, it was as simple as eyelashes. But to be more specific, it was an errant eyelash stuck in his right eye, and wow, it was as if the world had ended. He wouldn’t let us see his eye or touch his face or stop wiping and rubbing at the eye or blink like we kept encouraging him to do. And there were many, many tears and many, many, “But it hurts!!!” no matter if his eye was shut or momentarily open. Ben and I both took turns – rather long ones – working with him and I don’t think either one of us accomplished much other than determining what the actual irritant was. 

At first I think we were both saying to ourselves, “Seriously? Our beautiful afternoon is turning into a major meltdown over an eyelash?” But the more I thought about it and put myself in HD’s place, I realized that eyelashes gone astray can be so painful and I’m 31, not 3 1/2, so no wonder he was so upset! How do you tell a little guy that he needs to hold open his burning, stinging eye, so someone can stick their finger or a washcloth in there to try to get an eyelash to move off his eyeball? I mean, Ewwwww. No one likes to have anyone else poking around near their eyes, so I’m pretty sure now that the poor child was totally justified in being so upset with us and the fact that we couldn’t just fix it without going to what seemed like (and probably were) less than awesome extremes.

After twenty-plus minutes (that felt more like two hours) and enough tear shedding, the darn eyelash moved. We never officially got it out or off ourselves but somehow it either vacated the premise, got stuck with his other lashes, or did something that allowed him (and us) some relief. And just like that, he was back to playing Angry Birds and running up and down the play constructure. And just like that, our beautiful afternoon resumed. Talk about being grateful, for once, for the short attention span of a three-going-on-four-year-old!