The reason for our stay is minor. Our Posey had a little skin abrasion on her tush that got infected. If she were a grown-up, we wouldn’t even be in the hospital; her doctor could have taken care of it in his office.

But babies wiggle and cry and generally do not put up with being poked, prodded and stuck. So we are here, after midnight awaiting her turn in surgery.

"She sure is strong," says the poor man cursed with starting her IV line. I can only laugh. I know how hard it is to get a onesie over her head and buttoned over her diaper when she’s resisting. I can only imagine the difficulty he’s facing with his delicate task.

He gets the needle in on the first try, but she kicks and it slips out. Maybe, for Posey, the extra stick was worth the chance to kick the guy who was doing it to her.

When I was her age, about 15 months, I was admitted to the hospital with food poisoning. I gave two Navy corpsmen black eyes with the board they had attached to my arm for the sake of protecting the IV line. Heh. They should have been protecting their faces. Glass jaws.

Posey is asleep and the room is dim and silent except for the mechanical ticking of the IV pump and the soft whisper of the heat coming through the vents.

This was not supposed to be my day. Packing an overnight bag and bringing my daughter to the hospital for surgery was nowhere to be found on my To Do list.

Crying in front of a nurse over whether I would be allowed to stay with my daughter _ the one who has known me for only a month and who doesn’t even want me to go to the bathroom without her _ whether I would be allowed to stay with her until she was sedated so she wouldn’t be so scared.

And so she wouldn’t think I was handing her off to a new family _ one with masks and scrubs _ just as she had started to get used to this one. [an error occurred while processing this directive]