This Time We Stopped at Three, So Far

The week after our Indiana cousins left, we immediately began getting ready for the next set of cousins…and promptly we got sick.

Reagan started running a high fever. When she complained that her ear hurt, I thought for sure that she had an ear infection. Not wanting to put that off another day, I called the dr immediately. It was late in the afternoon, and they could only work us in if we came RIGHT THEN, so I packed up ALL THE KIDS and headed for the dr’s office. As it turned out, Reagan didn’t have an ear infection, BUT she did have strep! So it turned out to be a good thing that I had to bring all the kids with me because then they could ALL be checked for strep.

Jim met us at the office and took this picture with his phone. Four throat checks=four popsicles!

So that was Thursday. Aunt Jojo and Co. were set to arrive on Sunday, so Saturday was a big cleaning day. At least, it was SUPPOSED to be!

Jim headed out that morning with a friend of his, hoping to FINALLY get into the woods. This trip had been postponed twice already. The kids were playing. I was cleaning. And then, there it was…the piercing cry of a child who is actually really hurt. I rushed from the kids’ room where I’d been putting away laundry and found Jonathan in tears, crying out something about his head. Apparently, he was spinning in circles in the living room and fell, hitting his head on the coffee table.

Do you have any idea how many times a day my kids hit their heads on stuff? ALL THE TIME. So I thought, okay, he’s hit his head. Hold him. Make soothing noises. Comfort him until he stops crying.

But wait…What is all over the back of Jonathan’s shirt?!?

And then I saw it drip…the blood…from the back of his head.

My kids have had a lot of bumps on their heads, but never any that bled, so I have to admit that now I was the one who needed comforting because I started to get a little panicky. But I sucked it up and forced my voice to stay calm as I explained to Jonathan that he had a booboo on his head and I wanted to take him into my bathroom to get a better look at it.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t a large cut, but it looked deep, and I didn’t know what to do. Did he need stitches? I don’t know anything about stitches! I never in my life had an injury that required stitches! But I was pretty sure he needed stitches.

So I called Jim. He was about two miles from his exit to the woods. I made him turn around. I didn’t really have a plan at that point, just a vague idea that I needed to take Jonathan to Children’s and I would have to do something with the other kids and I needed Jim. Luckily, since he wasn’t standing in our bathroom looking at our son and his bloody shirt, he could be a little more rational. He suggested I make some phone calls and see if someone could come over and watch the kids until he got home and I could go ahead and take Jonathan to Children’s. Brilliant! In the end our wonderful neighbor Scott drug himself out of bed (he had just gotten back in town about 4:00 that morning) and came over to watch the kids while I left with J.

All this time, Jonathan had been GREAT. Since he couldn’t see the blood himself, he didn’t freak out about the injury, and he was really good about holding the rag to his head to help with the bleeding.

I managed to get him to Children’s (bloody shirt and all), and THEY WERE WONERFUL! All of the doctors and nurses, and there were strangely a lot of them, were so nice and helpful and so sweet to Jonathan.

They put a numbing cream on his cut so he barely noticed at all when they did the stitches. And since they called them “string band-aids,” he didn’t even know he got stitches!

It’s kind of hard to see, but his stitched-up cut is right there in the middle of the picture.

Jojo and Co. arrived the next day (post coming next, I hope) and their visit continued without further medical needs for anyone, but then the day after they left, my ears were yet again assaulted by piercing cries of pain. This time it was Thomas.

The kids were playing in their bedroom. Thomas was in the closet. The door was open. The door was shut. Open. Shut. Open. Thomas stuck his fingers in the crack between the hinge side of the door and the door frame.

Shut.

He screamed and screamed. I was terrified his fingers were broken, but he would barely let me look at them. He just kept crying and screaming, “Put on a band-aid! Put on a band-aid!” Since that was the only way he would let me touch him, I did. His middle finger was already turning purple and there was a bad scrape along the cuticle on that finger and the next two. They didn’t seem to be swelling which I took as a good sign, but I was afraid they might, so I tried to make the band-aids loose since I anticipated having to remove them later when he was calmer. I gave him some pain medicine and an ice pack and put him down for a nap, since he practically begged me for naptime. I called Jim and the dr’s office. They said to keep an eye on it and let them know if it got worse instead of better.

Thankfully, it didn’t get worse. Here’s a picture I took of his fingers a couple of days later. It’s been a couple of weeks now, and his middle finger still has a dark purple area under the nail.

It’s been a couple of weeks now since Thomas hurt his fingers, and so far Zachary has not been injured or gotten sick enough to need to see a dr. Hopefully, in THIS instance, we can be content to stop at three.