Yahoo #2 is our Emergency Room Child.
Vera pegged him as such before he even learned to walk.
"That one," she said,
"is your Emergency Room Child." Then I rolled my eyeballs left and right while thinking,
Oh hush, Vera. You don't know.
The thing is Vera really does know. She's quite handy for she's ten years my senior and has been around and done it all. Well, prolly not
it all. But you get my drift. She's got parenting experience that I do not got. And finally, after 8 some-odd years and her always being mostly right, I've decided to listen to her.
I'm not so quick. But you knew that.
Thankfully, luckily, with palliation and solace, Yahoo #2 has made it to age six and eleven days without anything too life threatening. That's my way of telling you that the following two stories have happy endings. It's a new hip and edgy blogging term called
aftshadowing and it's the opposite of
foreshadowing. (Or should it be forehighlighting?)
When Yahoo #2 was just shy of two, I left him in the kitchen alone. This is where you say, "
Well there you go, Rabid. There's the problem. Everyone knows you don't leave a just-shy-of-two-year-old in the kitchen by himself!" I left Yahoo #2 in the kitchen alone so as to fetch a blubbering, I-just-hurt-myself, dramatic, Yahoo #1. Yahoo #1 is the dramatic child in the same way that Yahoo #2 is the Emergency Room Child.
Incidentally, the keeping it straight with Yahoo #1 versus Yahoo #2 business, is making me wish I could use their real names. 'Tis a shame that I cannot. They have great names.
Anyway, while comforting Yahoo #1 with my tenderest of mercies (which really aren't all that tender), I hear a loud flop from the kitchen. So I run to the kitchen to find Yahoo #2 on the floor and rendered boobless (meaning he cannot cry). I really dislike that hold-the-breath thing that kids do. You know, where the kid has hurt himself, cannot cry, cannot breathe, is turning himself blue, and you just stare at them paralyzed until they finally take that much-anticipated gasp.
Yahoo #2 was doing that turn blue, not breathing thing. Finally, he took the gasp and started to cry. I picked him up and put him on the couch to care for the other one, who if you remember, was having his own dramatic moment. After getting Yahoo #1 to calm down, I went back to Yahoo #2. His eyes had glazed over, he wasn't making a sound, and blood was running out of his left ear. Lots of blood. Alarming amounts of red stuff was everywhere.
I called the doctor's office and bawled to the nurse that my child's brain was bleeding and it was all my fault. She responded with,
"Get him to the hospital, NOW."
I don't know much about medicine. But I do know that if you phone a doctor's office in the middle of the day, and they tell you to sidestep appointments and whatnot for the emergency room, your current situation is a dire one.
Long story, short, I rush the poor thing to the ER and they check him in while the Rabid mom admits fault for leaving him unattended in the kitchen. The hospital folk sedate the snot out of the boy and give him a cat scan. The cat meowed, the brain was clear and Yahoo #2 would be okay. He had, however, ruptured an eardrum or had broken the itty-bitty hearing bones in his ear--they couldn't tell which. Either way, no one knew if he'd hear out of that ear again.
After a few months of patience and prayer, the ear repaired itself and he passed a hearing test.
We had another... um... situation this weekend. It wasn't at all life threatening. But it made Spouse and I sick to our guts in unspoken what-have-we-done type guilt.
On Saturday, the Rabid Family was up for some frustrating fun so we went skiing. It was a good warm day with two inches of new. Our Yahoos are tree monkeys. We cannot keep them out of the trees. We can't follow 'em well either because their 110 centimeters can worm through stuff my 166s cannot. And Spouse is on something like 213s, so he cannot follow them either.
The above described scenario explains how we spend the day. The Yahoos break for the trees. We do our best to follow. The Yahoos lose control and wrap themselves around a tree, or hit a bump and crash, or plow into the pow and tip over. Spouse and I then make our way over to them and pick them up. It doesn't sound like a lot of work, but it is. I sleep like a baby when we get home.
Nose-blowing coach.
Lifts through the flat stuff. Check out Spouse's new boots.
A moment of silence for Crushed Calcaneuses.
Yahoo #2
This year, we are having wardrobe issues. We have a wild assortment of gear in colors, styles, decades and sizes. The Yahoos, however, are in-between sizes of what we have. We haven't decided if we should force 'em up a size, leave 'em behind or buy new. Last Saturday, we decided to rent gear for Yahoo #1 and put his old gear on Yahoo #2.
It seamed to work okay, the skis were a little long for Yahoo #2 but he was handling them without too much trouble. Spouse and I, however, had managed to overlook a crucial element in ski swapping.
Safe ski swapping, if you will. It has to do with the bindings on the skis that you swap and the
DIN settings that lie therein.
Long story, short, Yahoo #2 takes a ride on skis with bindings set for someone 20 pounds heavier. Yahoo #2 crashes, bindings don't release, and Yahoo #2 tweaks his knee. For two long days, that kid hobbled around. He chose to lay in bed instead of play video games. Now that's serious.
Spouse and I did not exchange words over this at all, but we knew. We both know about knees and have had enough friends and family with knee trouble too think that the Spouse and I just might have wrecked the knee of our poor six-year-old boy. Each of us had garish nightmare thoughts about a torn ACL, MCL or LCL.
We had giant puke rocks in our guts over this one.
It's so very hard to watch your children get hurt, isn't it? Nothing compares. Not tax season, not divorce, not starving to death, not even when your beloved spouse crushes his calcaneuses. But you gotta live, right? Tell me you gotta live! And you gotta let your kids live too. Which means they might get hurt. And sometimes it might even be my fault...
This is where I ask myself,
What would Shaun White's mom do?
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If you paid attention to the aftshadowing above, you'll note that Yahoo #2 is fine. He's running around like a banshee today. We'll be skiing again soon as long as
"What would Shaun White's mom do" says we should ski again.
Incidentally--scratch incidentally--purposefully, Spouse was annoyingly patient this weekend. I say annoyingly, because it's like I looked at his new patient persona and declared,
"where the hell did this patient parenting come from?" He was awesome. He
is awesome. So patient, so loving, so empathetic. I should award him the Patient Parent Prize. And being as we're all about alliterations, this prize should start with a "P"...
Popcorn?
