Running with Sticks

Running with Sticks

Today was just not my day. I stayed up late watching TV and talking with Shelby online thinking Colin would sleep in a little bit. I should have known I was jinxing myself right from the start. He was up at 6:45 and I was tired all day. My plan for the morning was to pop in a movie for Colin and clean as fast as I could for the 90 minutes the movie bought me. Of course any other time my kid would be begging to watch a movie and glued to the TV...not today. He was up my butt the entire morning and didn't watch 10 minutes of the movie. A 30-40 minute cleaning job of the upstairs bathrooms took about 2 hours with a "little helper" in the way. Toilet brush as a toy, my coffee spilled all over the place, spraying cleaner on everything in sight...oye. Then we hit the downstairs and picked up and swept the floors. It was sunny and 48 outside this morning so I was dying to get outside and let Colin play and check out the yard. Finally all the cleaning was done and I went upstairs to get changed so we could go outside. When I came back down I discovered Colin had played with the rabbit and dumped half the contents of the rabbit cage all over the clean floor. So it was back to cleaning and dragging out the vacuum, again. Sigh.

Eventually we did make it outside, right before lunch time. We blew bubbles and filled the bird feeders and played some. The ground has been thawed for a week or two now and with the temps in the 40's it is tricking the plants into thinking it's spring. Many of my bulbs in my flower beds are beginning to sprout up through the soil and my yard full of crocus is beginning to grow back. Colin was very interested in watching the bees travel from flower to flower in the yard and spent a lot of time squatting in the yard keeping an eye on them.

We hadn't been outside very long when Colin tripped and fell on one of the two bamboo plant stakes he was carrying around. I saw the whole thing happen and rushed over to check out his face, when I realized the stick hit him in the eye. Then the blood started running. I tried not to freak out as I threw him on the hood of my car to assess the cut. Too much blood so I had to run inside and clean some off. Blood now coming from his nose is scaring the shit out of me. Eye is swelling, but from what I can tell it is only a nice gash to the eyelid centimeters above his eye, and no damage to his actual eyeball. The bleeding slows down to almost nothing and he is not crying anymore, but it still looks pretty wide and I am worried it needs a stitch or two. I have had only a cup...scratch that, half a cup courtesy of helper Colin...of coffee all day, no food at all and the sight of my kid in pain is making me sick. I put Colin in front of the computer to show Shelby his eye on Skype and see what he thinks. He can't tell how bad it is, but he talks to Colin and entertains him long enough for me to go toss the minimal contents of my stomach into the kitchen sink. I can do blood and guts, just not the blood and guts of my baby.

I decided we probably should have it looked at, so we loaded up and headed to the ER. By the time we got there he was pretty much fine aside from dried blood. He was running around the waiting area like a nut and people were probably thinking "no wonder he busted his eye open!" If they only knew that I was thinking "I can't believe we made it to two and a half before needing stitches!" Forty minutes after signing in we got called back to triage and the nurse confirmed my fear, stitches necessary. I was so hoping I was just overreacting and they would slap some bacitracin and a bandaid on it and send me home. Wishful thinking...Colin did fantastic though. He didn't cry a bit, he cooperated for the doc and let him do everything he needed to. I also learned this nifty little trick of wrapping him up in a sheet to restrain his arms...yea this might come in handy during those nightly wrestling matches over teeth brushing. Teeth brushing is a two v. Colin job and with Daddy gone, Mommy has been getting her butt kicked. This just might have leveled the playing field, score one for Mommy! Colin really did amazing, he didn't even so much as whimper and all it took was two lollipops. One during the cleaning/assessing of the wound and one for the actual sutures part. One teeny tiny stitch was all it took.

Later on after Colin's bath he was playing with his dinosaurs on Skype in front of Shelby. He would have the dinosaurs roar and fight and then one would fall over and he would tell me that the dinosaur was hurt and needed to go to the doctor. It was pretty funny. He seems not to mind the stitch and has been leaving it alone so far. We get to go back and have it removed in 7 days, hopefully he can do as well removing it as he did getting it put in. Moral of the story: listen to your mother. She knew what she was talking about when she told you not to run with sticks/scissors/sharp objects, you really can poke your eye out!