The kind of big day one can generally do without

• life

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

All times are estimated :P

4am: 4yo wets the bed for the second morning in a row (yesterday morning it was 5am). I bathe him and strip the sheets and make up half the bed and in the meantime he goes to his bed where JJ is. JJ comes and squeezes into the dry side of the bed with me (tight fit as it’s the equivalent of a single at this point)

9am: finally haul self out of bed. 6yo has been awesome as per usual and has been managing 4yo while I slept in. Coffee, laundry, try to get some 3d done while intermittently poking at the server trying to figure out which bits were nomming the memory and cpu so much so often. Brain refusing to cooperate.

11:something am: remember the laundry and go hang it out. 4yo starts crying inside, ignore it as he and 8yo have been picking fights with each other for the last two weeks and I quite literally have a couple more things to hang out. Hang out the last two things, suddenly realise crying sounds different and wrong. Then hear 6yo exclaiming “Oh, quick, go tell Mum!” RUN INSIDE.

4yo is heading towards the back door and his hand is bleeding. I figure he’s been playing with a knife and speak quite calmly and slightly exasperatedly, saying we are going to clean it up and have a look, yes it probably does hurt and yes there’s a lot of blood, don’t worry, we’ll clean it up. Take him to the bathroom, wash the blood away, wash more blood away, and more blood, that’s flesh poking out of a gaping wound.

ADRENALINE.

Trying to pretend I’m calm, I say rather tersely to 6yo (who is the only one prepared to do anything as 8yo is walking around getting dressed having only just gotten out of the shower) “Go get my phone. NOW.” She runs and does so and in the meantime I look towards the kitchen, register the amount of blood trailing all over the house (from 4yo walking around the house looking for me) and the bamix on the floor, plugged in and on at the power point. I ring JJ and tell him without really thinking “Come home now, RIGHT NOW, 4yo’s put his hand in the blender, not missing any fingers but there’s a bad cut.” Poor JJ panics and says he’s coming now, and asks what hospital I’m going to. I say I’m no going to hospital, just down the road, he says he’ll meet me there.

While on the phone I’ve had 4yo holding a rag, take him to the dining table, find the First Aid Kit that’s supposed to be in my car (in very slightly related news, I need to actually redo my First Aid Certificate instead of thinking about redoing it), rip out a gauze pad and get him to hold that instead. I fly out the door telling the bigs to lock it and not let anyone in unless they know who it is (not that too many people are idiotic enough to jump the fence with the guard dog there), load the screaming child into the car and fly down the road way too fast to the medical centre on the corner.

Accidentally knock 4yo’s head while getting him out of the car. Parenting fail #2 for the day. Remember to lock car at least while trying not to sprint across the carpark (because I don’t want to stress child out any more than he already is though by this stage we probably have an adrenaline feedback loop well established).

The medical centre up the road is awesome. I whirlwind into reception and cheerfully inform the lovely receptionist that “he’s got a really bad cut on his hand” from playing with a bamix. She sympathises with 4yo, tells him not to put his blood-soaked gauze pad on the reception counter like he was about to and brings us out back to the treatment area. The nurse there brings us in and unwraps the gauze pad to have a look, eliciting screaming from the child who had calmed down a bit since. She examines and then rewraps his hand and it’s decided that he should sit on my lap and have a cuddle while she goes and gets the doctor we usually see, and says that they will “try to shove everything back in there” and tape it up.

While 4yo calms down again with me holding the slightly damp dressing on his hand (damp to stop it from sticking as they have to unwrap again), I call JJ and tell him to go home because I left the bigs there, he says he’s 10 or 15mins away and will go home. He picks them up from the house and they come up before the doctor is able to come in. I tell him what happened and he says he thought i meant the actual big proper blender that 4yo would have lost a couple of fingers in if he’d stuck his hand into that. Doctor arrives and we decide to send the bigs out as it’s likely to be a bit gruesome. They go out to the play area and JJ is going to go supervise but 4yo starts crying as he wants JJ to stay, I prep to go out but he doesn’t want me to go either, as it turns out he doesn’t want to stay. Doctor and Nurse unwrap 4yo’s hand to examine.

Cue screaming. I try to cover 4yo’s eyes but he wants to see what’s going on, and spends a lot of time screaming at the worst gashed finger which is puffy and disgusting looking at this stage, and telling Doctor and Nurse “it’s the other finger!” while they’re very quickly wrapping up the smaller gash which is still bleeding and more straightforward to deal with. When they get onto the worse looking one there is a bit of a mess as they try to work out which is the best way to tape it and issues with the tape not sticking because there’s too much blood. All this is stressing 4yo out, it obviously hurts as he continues flailing and screaming “MEANIE! MEANIE” among various screeches of how much it hurts at them. They eventually get it taped up and bandage it up. I’m mildly concerned about the angle of his fingers (they looked bent slightly backwards) though I told the nurse I trusted her bandage skills. She was nice and rewrapped it enough that it looked less like his fingers were being bent back the wrong way.

We’re told the bandages are to be kept clean and dry and to come back later in the week for them to change the dressing and see how it’s going. I’m advised to give him Painstop before the appointment. 4yo is given an “Award for being so brave” certificate.

12:40ish pm: come home, set 4yo up in front of tv. Talk to JJ for a bit, both of us generally being relieved that 4yo got off lightly all things considering, and exasperated because what the hell he’s never been inclined to do something that monumentally stupid before. JJ shoots back to work, I sit in front of my computer with a coffee and scream and limb flail and generally panic in my head for a couple of hours. Go check on 4yo and find that he’s fallen asleep on the couch. Move him to his bed with no drama.

4yo had the 4 top front teeth extracted end of last week (altercation with one of his siblings when he was 2-3 which resulted in those teeth dying a few months later, everything was fine aside from some crumbling, then one of them went supermanky either because of or causing a couple of abscesses in the gum which made his breath smell atrocious and him supercranky). I really hope he’s used up all his bad luck for a while.

Yeah kids, when some stuffy old adult who is too old and lame to remember what it’s like being a kid or how to have fun tells you not to do something, it’s usually (usually, I know some people are way over the top in what they’re worried about ;) so you won’t die or lose bits, not because they want to spoil your fun for the sake of it.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License