First Stitches in Our Family

And the winner was Dominic, age 8.  I guess it is not too bad to have stitches from an injury once in 11 years of marriage.  So here is the story of how it happened.  You know the game Marco Polo, which is usually played in a pool?  Well, the kids learned a version at a homeschool event and on the first Sunday afternoon in April, Dominic and the girls went outside to play it.  One person is blindfolded (this was Dominic) and he calls out, "Marco!"and the other players must answer, "Polo!"  He then tries to catch them.  You can see where this is going.  Dominic was soon running around the yard blindfolded, trying to catch the girls.  One of the girls (who shall remain nameless) climbed up onto the grotto, which is large and built out of rocks.  Did I mention these rocks are rough and jagged?  So, Dominic ran toward his sister, tripped, and fell headfirst into the grotto, striking his head on one of those rocks.  If you are squeamish, you might want to stop reading now, and also skip the middle two pictures.  I was inside, relaxing on the couch, reading the Sunday paper, when Catherine burst in through the back door and exclaimed, "Dominic fell down and he's bleeding!"  We all rushed outside to see Dominic standing in the yard, with blood gushing down the side of his face, partly staunched by the blindfold which he had pushed up off his eyes.  After checking his wound, he and I went off to the ER.  I do have to mention, the girls and Joseph were a bit hysterical.  They'd never seen so much blood before.  I think that they thought he was half-dead!  Dominic was a trooper, although he did keep saying, "I wish this didn't happen!"

In the ER, waiting for the topical anesthetic to take effect.

When the doctor came in to stitch him up, I took a picture of the laceration.

5 stitches!

A few days later.

Dominic said afterwards that he will never play that game again!

A Scarf And A Black Eye

Catherine finished her first knitting project.  She did a great job!

If you noticed something off about that first picture, you were right.  Catherine had a swollen, black eye.  This is what happens when you get in the middle of your brothers' sword fight:

Anthony's "Adventure"

I wanted to write about this, so I wouldn't forget.  So here's the story.

Last Friday morning before school, I was doing a few things in the kitchen, while the girls were reading in the living room and the three boys were playing in Anthony's room.  I finished what I was doing and as I walked into the living room to put something away, I heard a blood-curdling screaming and crying coming from Anthony.  Not the "somebody touched me cry," this one was real.  I rushed into his room to find Anthony sitting on the floor, crying and saying, "Nuh-Nuh." (That's his name for Dominic.)  I picked him up and he was not to be consoled.  I figured out his leg hurt, but it took me a while to get the story of what happened out of the boys. 

Joseph and Anthony were under Anthony's bed, pushing the mattress up with their feet through the slats.  Then Dominic thought it would be fun to jump on the bed and make the mattress go back down, and so he did.  Joseph was fine, but poor little Anthony's leg got hurt by the slats from what I could tell.  All the rest of the day, he would not walk and any time he tried to put weight on his leg, he cried.  When this continued Saturday morning, I took him to an urgent care center to make sure he didn't have a fracture.  Anthony did really well there and even laid still for the x-rays, though he didn't like it.  The x-ray did not show an obvious fracture, but there were a couple of areas of possible concern, so we went home and waited for a call after the radiologist looked at it.  Finally by the late afternoon, I called and found out it was all negative.  Hooray!

Poor Anthony, though, has been hobbling around the last few days, and you can tell his leg hurts him. He tries to run, and falls over.  Yesterday he tried to jump off the couch and that hurt!  It is gradually getting better, however.  It is strange, though, to see a little two year old limping around.   He's been cranky and we've had to carry him around a lot, but we are very happy his leg wasn't broken!  I'm sure he will soon be back to his normal running, jumping little self.