Find That Toy and Have it Shot!

I generally discourage the children from standing on things in order to look out of the window. It’s just not safe. But there are those times when no one is shoving or pushing and they just placidly stand there and look outside. They watch the occasional car drive down the street, or they observe the rain as it falls silently drenching the earth and making the backyard too soggy to play in. And they are quiet.

I like quiet. I like it so much that I hardly listen to the radio while driving. I don’t generally put anything in to the CD player, except Bob the Tomato or Larry the Cucumber, unless I feel a little cranky. Then it’s usually Norah Jones or Christmas music. I like quiet.

The other day I allowed my love for peace and quiet to surpass my common sense. I decided to let the kids sit/stand on the ottoman together and gaze out the front window. As I went back to my vacuuming I had the sense of impending doom gnawing at the back of my mind. It was only moments before the first strains of a crying baby reached my ears.

The cry sounded like the normal my-brother-took-my-toy cry, not the wail of a maimed child, so I shut off the vacuum and turned to walk, not run, into the living room. When I turned the baby came staggering into the room with blood on her hands and face.

Times like these are when a mother has to try and soothe her wounded child while at the same time pushing that child to arms length in an attempt to discover where the blood is originating. The child doesn’t like this. All she wants to do is crawl inside of her mommy’s skin and be all better.

It wasn’t long before I found the boo-boo. After the little girl fell it would seem that she left behind a small triangular shaped piece of her lower left cheek when she came looking for me because it was most definitely missing from her face. She was so sad, and it hurt me to see my little angel with a raw gouge glistening on her perfect little cheek.

For some reason I was really anxious to determine exactly what was responsible for dealing such a blow. My son offered absolutely no help; he was very unconcerned with his sister’s plight. Perhaps it was because she wasn’t screaming at decibels as yet unknown to man that he didn’t think her situation to be grave enough to merit attention.

I picked up all the toys near the window and examined rough or pointy edges for speared flesh or fresh blood. There was none to be found. Anywhere. Chunks of flesh just don’t disappear. After a couple of minutes I felt really silly playing forensic detective guy and resigned myself to nursing my wounded child in spite of the mystery surrounding the wounding. Because, really, it doesn’t matter what rogue toy inflicted the gash so much as being thankful that it missed her eyeball. And the time was better spent snuggling the poor little girl with the mangled and puffy cheek until she fell asleep.

Respect the Pepper

I had a near death experience yesterday. Yes, I do believe I almost died. There I was, stripping the seeds from a jalapeno pepper, minding my own business and making some yummy fresh salsa. Having done this plenty of times in the past I was trucking along all the while attempting to keep the children from getting too close to the vicious oils of the hot pepper.

It wasn’t until about thirty minutes later that the burn started. When I say burn, I mean the sensation of being cooked alive in boiling hot oil, turned on a spit over hot coals, and then having one’s hands ironed to get the wrinkles out.

I could see the burn spreading across my hand. It started in between my fingers and slowly worked its way toward the back of my hand. I doused my hands in cool water and scrubbed them with soap for the tenth time (I’m a little OCD when it comes to washing the pepper oils from my hands). It didn’t help.

A paste was made from baking soda and water and I squished it through my fingers and let it permeate my skin. It felt great for about one minute and then the burning came back with a vengeance. Thus commenced the long search for something, anything, that would relieve the agonizing death-throes that were pulsating through my body.

I tried soaking them in lemon juice, white distilled vinegar, yogurt, rubbing alcohol. I sprayed them with Dermoplast and coated them in aloe infused with Lidocaine. I even sunk so low as to soak them in milk. Nothing helped and as the night wore on the burn spread and worsened.

In desperation I swallowed three Tylenol. It was suggested that I take Benadryl. I took two. I cannot ever remember medicating with Benadryl. It made me very sleepy; and then when I went to sleep it made me wake up. I don’t drink alcohol, but if we kept it in the house I am convinced that I would have made a slobbering drunk out of myself to dull the pain in my flaming hands. It was that bad.

The only thing that would offer any lasting relief was to clasp an ice pack in both of my hands like the dear treasure it was. The whole experience got me wondering. Of all the times I have handled hot peppers in the past I had never had an issue like this before. I suddenly realized that this time I had stripped the seeds from the pepper with my fingers instead of using a knife to do so. This is a monumentally idiotic- and painful- thing to do.

Upon awakening this morning the searing pain in my hands was gone. The incident that should be so fresh in my mind is already fading, as experiences accompanied by large amounts of pain are wont to do. I should have liked to write about all of this last evening before the event was handed over to my treacherous memory, but a person would have had to pry the ice pack from my cold and lifeless hands, as I would not put it down willingly, even to write.

Is There A Band-Aid In The House?

My son has figured out that he can open the refrigerator door all by himself. He will go in to get his cup of milk all by himself or to unwrap some leftover pancakes from yesterday’s breakfast. Thankfully he hasn’t tried to play catch with any of the eggs yet. This afternoon he came into the dining room and plunked down a container of Spaghettios to eat for a snack.

I had another moment the other day when I marveled at the fact that I can still behave like a brand-new mommy. The kids and I were out shopping; when we left the store I looked down at BoBeans and noticed that he had blood smeared all over his face and also his left hand. “For Heaven’s sake!” my mind screamed, “What is going on? He isn’t crying and he’s acting perfectly normal! Is he delirious?!” (I’m not generally this insane at the sight of blood, but I was so startled that I misplaced my proper reaction. To my credit, I did stay outwardly calm). I first examined his head to make sure the blood wasn’t originating there. It was much more concentrated on his hand, and I quickly saw the reason for the mess.

He had chewed on a hangnail. A person wouldn’t think that a little finger-chewing could produce so much blood, but there it was. One would also think that someone who has been doing this mommy thing for over two-and-a-half years would carry Band-Aids. Especially when the toddler is a boy. Think again. The poor kid continued to bleed while I stood there applying pressure to his boo-boo with a baby wipe.

After a few minutes I gave up and we made our way to another store in the promenade that I hoped would have some type of bandage simply because it sold children’s clothing. While the store did not keep Band-Aids on hand one of the employees happened to have bandages in her purse that were left over from a recent trip she had taken.

I guess I’m going to have to buy a larger bag in order to keep everything on hand that I seem to find myself in need of these days. Perhaps I can just take a class and learn how to fold things into tiny little squares: that way I can just fold up the whole house and take it with me everywhere I go.

Oh, The Burning!

While frying eggs yesterday morning, my husband decided he would be able to flip them a little easier if he braced a finger against the side of the skillet. He quickly realized that the blue gas flame not only heats the cooking surface of the pan, but the sides as well. It turns out that I really should have refrained from teasing him because a few hours later found me suffering from a burn wound myself.

In the act of removing my ceramic stone from the oven, atop which some lovely toasted bread sat, my left palm brushed against the wire rack which is supposed to make the stone safer and easier to remove from the oven. One wouldn’t think that gently brushing against blazing, sizzling metal could produce a glaring inch-long white sear. I had hoped that if I ran my open palm under cold water for a while any blisters would be deterred from forming.

Having a wound that renders one’s hand practically useless is very detrimental to a mother. Trying to change the diaper of a wriggling baby one-handed is a bit of a trick. In the eight hour span between when the accident occurred and bedtime I had to keep ice on the burn constantly, or the fiery pain would actually make my eyes water. Even after I fell asleep the pain woke me intermittently during the night. It caused me once again to consider the practice of cauterizing wounds. I believe if it were my choice I would prefer taking a bullet and being put out to pasture instead of biting a bullet and smelling my flesh cook.

Regardless, I did have to give my husband a lesson on “how the stove works” again. After hearing the tick-tick-tick followed by the whoooosh of the burner igniting no less than three times in six seconds, I hastened to his side with a cry of, “you’re going to kill us all!” just in time to watch him position the dial at a setting that doesn’t even exist.

He claims that it was the urgent sincerity in my voice coupled with the actual words that caused him to cackle uncontrollably, and he was hasty to reassure me that he was in no way endeavoring to fill up the entire house with gas fumes. I believe the root his inability to learn how the dials operate after repeated lessons, is that his man’s brain has a hard time grasping that the dial works in a counter-clockwise manner, as he seems to be intent on making it work in the more logical clockwise way.

If, at any time, I go for a week or more without posting a new blog please be advised that it might be due to the fact that I am lying on the kitchen floor choking on poisonous fumes. If such an event should occur I would ask that the proper authorities be notified and that take-out would be ordered for the duration of my recovery since my husband would henceforth be banned from playing with the stove.

Gate Crasher

My tough little girl got her first bloody lip the other night. I don’t know if this happens to all children, but both of my kids had their first bleeding boo-boo by injuring that tendon that runs from the top lip to the gums. I think that she is destined to get hurt just as much as or more often than her brother regardless of the fact that she is a girl.

I had placed the baby in the kids’ bedroom to play while I got my son and myself ready for bed. He was impatient to have access to his room and instead of waiting for me to lift him over the baby gate to deposit him safely on the other side he decided to stand in the hallway and give the gate a couple of good thumps.

The thing must not have been snug into the doorframe tightly enough because the next thing I knew the gate gave way and trapped my screaming infant beneath it. I suppose I have to take some responsibility for the mishap considering that I put the gate up. It is also possible that the gate is simply not meant to take the brute force of a twenty-nine pound toddler throwing himself at it like a battering ram. (That may be a bit of an exaggeration since I didn’t actually see him do it, but that’s sure what it sounded like.)

Two complications inevitably arise from this sort of situation. The first is the challenge of making a two-point-five year old understand the concept of cause and effect- you pushed on the gate and it fell causing the baby to fall over backward, hit her head and bleed from the mouth; the second difficulty is whether to clean the blood out of the baby’s mouth with a tissue or tip her head forward so she can stop gurgling and spit the moisture out of her mouth onto the carpet.

I opted for swabbing the blood out of her mouth, and her brother seemed to understand that he had hurt her because he was pretty anxious to give her kisses and say sorry. My little girl recovered rather quickly from her accident and was back to climbing over obstacles and throwing herself in harm’s way in no time at all. I’m starting to think that I should just bundle her in bubble wrap and be done with it. It would definitely reduce the number of gasp-and-run moments.