What a way to start off the summer. Scott says it's a shame I washed the blood off Josh's face before I could take a picture, but this it the closest we'll get. On the first day of swimming lessons I sent the boys down to the pool on their bikes while I got Lydia and Isaac situated in the stroller. From the driveway I heard what I thought was Josh calling to me. From the sound of the voice I knew I should leave the kids there in the stroller and jump in the car. I passed Caleb running home and found Josh walking his bike home just up from the footbridge with tears in his eyes and blood running down his face. A car had pulled over just before I got there. There was a woman standing with her arm around his shoulders asking him if he lived nearby. I parked on the grass and told her I was his Mom. I told Josh to get in, and I would put his bike in the trunk. No, you don't have to buckle, I said. I thanked the woman who stopped and sped home. In the bathroom I washed him up to find a deep gash above his eyebrow. I called my neighborhood EMT (AKA our neighbor, Duane) and he came over to inspect. We decided if we could keep it together with butterfly strips he should be OK.
He missed his swimming lesson, but the teacher let him sit with Lyd during hers. I saw the school's nurse practitioner at the pool with her kids and asked her to take a look. She said as long as I could keep him from messing with it, he'd be fine.
Oh, so what happened? On the way down the hill at the foot bridge he got a little wobbly and ran into the chainlink fence that crosses the bridge. Of course, he had just started wearing a different helmet that doesn't cover his forehead as well as the one that protected him when he ran into th mailbox. It wasn't a sharp part of the fence or anything, he just went over the handlebars into a regular diamond shape in the fence links.
Now Lydia. You can barely see the injury in this picture, but it's her middle finger. Days after Joshua's incident she and Josh were on the floor in front of the recliner. They lifted the footrest from the floor, and Lydia's finger got caught in the scissor-like accordian mechanism. Caleb and I were sitting on the couch, and both reacted at once. I went and reached my hand under to evaluate and hold her in place. Without being asked Caleb let the footrest down with the handle. It was bleeding through the fingernail. I was freaking out thinking she would lose her nail or feeling in her fingertip.
It took a long, long time to calm her down. We held ice on it while she drifted to sleep. After she was out for a while I went in and tickled the tip of her finger to assure myself that all was well. She wiggled back.
Within a couple of days she was saying that it was all better, though it would take until the end of August for all signs of injury to disappear. We were lucky with both of these incidents that no long-term damage was done.
