Also On The Subject of First Aid

Last week as Moses was running through the kitchen, he tripped on nothing and fell right onto the open baby gate's bottom latch. It's this little, thin, round piece of metal and it sliced him right under the lip. Anyone who's had or seen a face/head wound knows the bleed like the dickens, so it took me a while to find out where exactly he was injured in all the gushing blood and screaming.

The cut was not wide but looked pretty deep, and I thought perhaps it had gone all the way through his lip. I called my mom. Called Richard, asked him if he could leave work. He said he'd meet me at Urgent Care. So then I had to get the kids packed up and ready to sit at urgent care for who knows how long, and Moses was still screaming and howling and Grace was out riding her bike around the block and Judah was, well he was just lying quietly on the floor, so that was all right.

I went to the door, screamed as loud as I could for Grace, went back inside, turned on some cartoons and set Moses in front of the TV with a cold washcloth on his lip. He immediately stopped crying (I think he was so shocked at the TV being on in the middle of the day that all else paled in comparison.) Judah was still on his tummy on the floor where he had been before, so I packed a diaper bag and Grace came home and I got her to help me get Mo in the car, get a bottle of water, some snacks, Moses' shoes, some ice for his lip, etc. She also packed five story books, some colored pencils, a notebook, some stickers, a coloring book and a doll catalog.

Finally we were ready to go, so I scooped up Judah and saw why he had been so quiet this whole time. When Moses had fallen, he had dropped a half-eaten plum on the floor. Judah had crawled over and was going to town on it. It was only a little gross. So I figured, what the heck, washed it off and put it in one of those fruit holder mesh-bag-with-a-handle thingies for him to keep eating.

At the clinic, we were told that Moses could get a couple stitches or we could just let it heal on its own. With stitches the scar would be a tiny bit smaller, but that would also include going to Children's where Mo would be sedated and put in a straightjacket thing to get his face stitched. Hmmm. We'll go with the scar and skip the trauma.

So all in all, it turned out fine. We got frozen fruit bars for Moses to suck on to keep the swelling down and his lip has healed just fine. Actually, what looks worse in the huge bruise on his forehead from where he ran into the swing earlier that same morning.

Is this what I have to look forward to with boys??