View-finder

The number of people who can visit our sweet baby Hazel Grace is very limited.  You must be immediate family, a grandmother or grandfather (only 2 of each is allowed), or someone on a special list of 4, and you can not get in without either Jimmy or me, and you may only have 2 people at the isolette at one time, and one of them must be either Jimmy or me.  So, suffice it to say that only a small handful of people have ever had the privilege of laying eyes on our miracle.  

I was visiting with someone who is standing in as my mother in this situation since my mother can not be here, and she asked if she could take a picture.  Seeing as I trust her enough to let her be my 'mother', I said ok, and she stepped back a bit, pulled out her iphone and aimed to take a shot of our tiny princess.

As I looked over her shoulder, and I looked through the viewfinder on her phone to the image that she was capturing, I saw how different the image was from the real baby who was lying in the isolette. 

Through the viewfinder, I saw a bunch of wires and tubes and IV's and medical tape, 

but shifting my position slightly and looking past the camera lense brought me a completely different view...

my baby.

Hazel Grace.

Looking straight on, it was easy to see my Hazel for who she is...

a sweet tiny human fighting for her life...

someone with depth...

someone with a soul.

But looking at the same layout as seen through the viewfinder, it was much harder to see her in there.  Everything just appeared as a tangle of wires and tubes. 

It's not that the quality of the image was bad, it's just that the viewfinder was finding the wrong view.

And I wondered...

How often do I do that?

How often do I look around me and see my tiny, sick baby and my tangle of weeds in the front yard and the laundry piled up ready to take over the house and swallow a small child, and the sticky counters and the moldy bread and the dust bunny in the corner and the picture that's still crooked from where it was hung last week after the cat died and no one has yet to fix it...

and the....and the....

the list goes on.

And I wonder what the point of it all is.  Why wipe the counters when they will just get sticky again and I barely have the energy to get up out of bed let alone straighten a picture on the wall, and if the laundry is going to swallow a child, can I pick which one?  If I let it pile up more, will it take two?  

And then I see...

It's not that the quality of my images are bad...it's really true...I DO have a lot of laundry and I DO have sticky counters and crooked pictures and dust bunnies.

But maybe I'm finding the wrong views...

Baby Hazel is sick, but she's still here.  

And the laundry and the stickiness and the dust bunnies are all signs of life...both of life here in the house and of the life that is in baby Hazel.  Because if we weren't going to see her every day, maybe I would have taken the time to fix that picture or wipe that counter.

But sweet baby Hazel Grace is there and she is breathing and she is waiting for us to come and see her.

So...maybe the dust bunnies will get stuck to the counter and quit floating around, and maybe the laundry pile will get so high it will obscure the lopsided picture...

but that's fine because tonight, I'm finding the right views...

and I've got a baby with a sweet soft fuzzy tennis ball sized head that needs some lovin'!

Tomorrow's a different story...maybe tomorrow I'll get lost again in the viewfinder of life, 

but everyone tells me to take it one day at a time...

so that's exactly what I'm doing.