F*&king Facebook. Leave it to that platform to add guilt to envy and jealousy among its users. It seems like half my FB friends have started preaching gratitude. It was one thing when everyone was bragging about their lives, their children, their accomplishments, their adventures. I can keep up with that. But gratitude? That’s like confession or therapy. That’s not “me”. It should be. I’d like it to be, but I’m just so busy in my head 24/7 that I don’t stop to appreciate the brilliant wildflowers out my window, the full belly, the faint hum of the A/C on a 90-degree day. Well, today, I’m going to start tying to be more grateful. I’m sure none of you really care but for those who know me know this is a big deal. I’m kind of selfish- I take a lot for granted; let’s just say that.

I’ve been accused of being someone who is constantly maximizing their yield. I own that. Therefore, leave it to me to find a reason to be grateful- I’m told more good things will come your way. Perhaps it’s like entering a drawing- you have nothing to lose and you can’t win if you don’t play. What’s a few minutes contemplating your lot in life? I hear that slowing down to breathe is a good thing. Plus, when you really think about it, it’s like that whole “glass is half full” mentality. You know, optimistic peeps see it full; negative peeps see it as half empty. I’m definitely a half full girl.

Enough rambling. Today I’m grateful my daughter still has her eye.

And that she is such an incredible trooper and inspiration. The surgeon said he thought it was going to be much worse but he says she’s going to be fine. We have to watch for infection and for a possibility of her eyeball bulging but it can be fixed by an ocular plastic surgeon if it comes down to it. Now we’re one of those ‘look at the Adlers’ it can happen to anybody examples. Sage has been the model of perfect health – aside from the yearly cold and an ear infection or two, she’s never been hospitalized or given us a scare. That all changed when a neighborhood dog bit in the face on Monday. I blame myself. We have a dog and we never had to worry about those two together so I the conversation about putting her face near a dog’s face never happened.

This ‘other’ dog was always very friendly to her, other kids, other people, other dogs. From conversations with trainers, it was asserting dominance over a pack member. It did not try to kill Sage or rip her to shreds. It was one bite and back away. Still, the whole ordeal was horrifying.

I cleaned the wound, called her health insurance to find out where to take Sage and rushed over to the Park City ER all before you could say, “Help! I need a doctor!”

The ER doc called the three plastic surgeons that have privileges at the hospital and not one of them responded. She confidently offered to sew up Sage herself but this is her face, dammit. I wasn’t going to trust it to someone without YEARS of experience suturing a child’s face. We scooped her up, said ‘Bye’, and rushed down to the ER at Primary Children’s. The doctors there are meticulous and professional. She was seen relatively quickly but we still didn’t get home until 2 a.m. They numbed the area, gave her enough anesthesia to keep her from an awareness of what they were doing, stuffed her stuffing back into her eye and closed up the wound. Sage never cried or fought. Even while she was under, she kept saying repeatedly, ‘Momma, where are you? …Momma, is that you touching my shoulder?…. I love you, Momma.’ My heart was breaking. My beautiful little girl could be horribly disfigured because I took good dogs for granted.

Two days later her eye is still very swollen but Sage doesn’t complain. She laughs when Ryan jokes about her street cred on the hockey ice now. The doctor told us she will have a small scar that makeup will hide or it could even fade to nothing. Other than looks, she’s the same ol’ Sage and, thankfully (here’s me being grateful again), she’s not afraid of dogs.

She refused to miss a single day of her SpyHop film class and she couldn’t wait to film her scenes as Snow, the white kitten. So I packed her Glow in the Dark Wolverine sunglasses we got at the Macklemore concert last OR and dropped her at school.

I have to go now. She just walked in prancing to Taylor Swift’s I Knew You Were Trouble and asked me to dance with her. And I was grateful to have such an awesome kid.

UPDATE: 3/14/2014- You can barely see the scar and the doctor is done with his followups. If she’s bothered at all by the time she’s a teen we can revisit for a revision. But I think the docs at Primary Children’s did an awesome job, don’t you?