Never a Dull Moment....

Note from Jen: This was written a while ago. I found it cleaning up my computer files and decided to post it. But this did happen a little time past....

Also, I'm so sorry, but I was completely reckless with my verb tense and didn't bother to correct it when I read back over it. Sorry, Mrs. Stev.....Rebecca!:)

So after months of not posting anything I decided to grab some of the tidbits of news and goings-on around here and come up with a nice juicy blog post. I have all these old envelopes and receipts lying around with things scrawled on them to remind me of things or ideas I want to write about, stashed in my computer drawer. There were several topics I was considering, of course all right up the alley of the title of my blog, Musings of an Intellectual. Things like what it's like to clean a bathroom that's used by three members of the human male species, or how Elijah managed to get his leg stuck in his bicycle such that it took five grown men, a toolbox, and an hour to take the bike apart piece by piece to extricate his leg. Or about my night shift guard dog, somebody's very old, very arthritic, very sweet dog in the area hereabouts that comes over to my house only at night and sleeps on the rug in front of my door and eats all my bologna. Or even about how the passenger side floor of my Jeep is currently doubling as a foot spa given the two inches of standing water coming in from somewhere and not going back out anywhere. But as I was pondering this extremely thought-provoking subject last evening, Something Happened.

For those of you who know me and my offspring, you know that my twins are as different from one another as night and day. If you don't know me, read some of my other posts about my kids and you'll get the idea. Jonathan is like the Terminator, only smaller and with a fake plastic gun. He is into everything, curious about everything, very hands-on and determined to break Guinness World Records for Amount of Time Necessary to Break Shit. So to break up the monotony of what is becoming a VERY long summer, indoors most of the time because of the heat and absence of a pool, I decided in my great wisdom that I was going to be Super-Parent and do something meaningful and educational with my kids to help prepare them for kindergarten, which they're entering in the fall, and I was going to DO IT DURING THE SUMMER NO LESS. How great a parent am I, right? Jonathan has some problems with fine motor skills and his teachers encouraged us to work with him during the summer on fine motor things like buttons, snaps and zippers, and to help him learn to use pens, pencils, glue and scissors. So we have a little bag of all of these supplies, all kid-friendly, including a pair of those plastic safety scissors, SAFETY being the marketing catchphrase here. The boys are really into the mail right now and the post office and envelopes and stamps, and it's like the second coming of Christ when they get something in the mail, like the postcards my dad and stepmom routinely send the boys when they're traveling. So they decided they wanted to draw pictures and cut them out, put them into envelopes with a stamp and take them to the post office to mail to various family members, never mind that the addresses the boys wrote on the front of the envelopes might as well have been written in Israeli. We're all sitting at the kitchen table and I'm trying my best to let the boys do as much as possible by themselves – I'm just a benevolent presence at the table, offering helpful suggestions and praise every few minutes. Jonathan decided to use the kid scissors to cut something out that he had drawn, and I was watching Elijah use half a bottle of Elmer's glue to close his (self-adhesive) envelope (which ended up glued to the table, but that's neither here nor there). Then Jonathan said to me in a perfectly calm voice, as if he were asking about the weather, "Mom, can I have a Transformers Band-Aid?" And I looked over to see what for, and Jonathan holds up his left hand that is literally running with blood, down his hand, down his elbow and dripping onto the floor. So I hustle him into the bathroom to wash it off to assess the damage and the second I hold his finger under the running water he lets out a scream that they probably heard in Apex, and he doesn't stop screaming. He was standing on the toilet seat holding his hand under the water, and he starts flailing and thrashing around, screaming the whole time. I finally get him calmed enough to take a look at the finger, and it turns out that he has actually cut off the top of his left index finger with the safety scissors. That are meant for children to safely use while remaining safe and intact doing safe things inside instead of playing with the garbage disposal or at the sewage treatment plant or in the middle of the interstate. So after leaving the bathroom that looks like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and soaking an extra-large washcloth with blood that doesn't show any sign of stopping, we get in the car and drive to the nearest Urgent Care. I'll pause here to mention my frustration with the fact that emergencies never happen when I'm in formal evening dress or have just come from a wedding or a recent stint with a plastic surgeon and a shopping spree and makeover at Saks Fifth Avenue. Every time there's an emergency I end up having to rush to the ER looking like Hefty the Housebitch, dressed in ratty spandex and three-day-old t-shirts with no makeup on and my hair looking like I just time-warped from a bad day in 1984. Last night I happened to be wearing an old pair of fuschia-colored spandex cropped pants and the oldest t-shirt I own, a stained white one with old ketchup stains, paint splatters, and holes that says on the front "LAPD Bomb Squad", and on the back says "If you see me running, try to keep up". It's definitely not a shirt I wear in public. I hadn't shaved my legs in a week and my feet were in beat-up flip-flops, and chipped pink nail polish and heels that haven't seen lotion since Reagan was in office were a horror story all their own. So we roll into the local urgent care, Jonathan's maimed finger wrapped up in a bloodstained washcloth, the poor child the picture of patheticness. I hustle both boys up to the check-in desk and give them my insurance information and sign us in to be seen. They call Jonathan back pretty quickly (although he's had just enough time to introduce himself and his wound to everyone else in the waiting room), and get us settled in the exam room. A very nice, very YOUNG doctor comes in, accompanied by another guy, apparently a nursing student studying to be a physician assistant. The first thing the student says when he sees Jonathan's hand is, "Wicked cool!". The young doctor smiles tolerantly and explains the various mechanics and attributes of "the wound" and how it would best be treated, using all kinds of exciting terminology in the process. Meanwhile Jonathan is sitting on the stretcher bed, staring from one guy to the other, back and forth, trying to follow what they were saying and for the love of all things holy were there going to be needles involved? So the Very Young Doctor turns to me and informs me of our options. One, we can insert a needle along several points in Jonathan's finger to numb it and…..I forget the rest because I don't think I even heard him as I was foaming at the mouth and curling into the fetal position. My overloaded brain and my spandex pants couldn't cope with the idea of Jonathan getting a shot, much less multiple ones. Plus at that point he had heard the word "needle" and was trying to tunnel to Outer Mongolia through the wall of the exam room using only his bare hands and a plastic urine cup. The Very Young Doctor saw this and quickly switched gears, saying that we could simply treat the still-bleeding wound with silver nitrate, which would literally cauterize the tip of the finger and stop the bleeding, but would be painful for Jonathan. I assured the Very Young Doctor that my son would joyfully submit to having his eyelids stapled to the wall if it meant we could avoid needles, so let's just go ahead and have the silver nitrate party. So Jonathan at this point has relaxed a bit after being assured there will be no needles involved in this process. Then the Very Young Doctor bends down and tells Jonathan that what he is about to do will stop the bleeding, but it will hurt, most likely with the very noble idea that telling kids something is going to hurt is better than lying to them and saying it won't. Now, I know there are different schools of thought on this. Let me just stop here and say that I am a huge proponent of lying to your kids. Or in my mind, "redirecting". I can see Jonathan mentally girding his loins, preparing for the ordeal. The Very Young Doctor gets the silver nitrate and gently dabs it on the tip of Jonathan's finger, which immediately turns black. He has to do this several times in several places to stop the bleeding. Jonathan just stares at his finger. He doesn't flinch, he doesn't cry, he doesn't do anything, except say after the first three or four dabs, "Mom, can we go home now?". Finally the process is finished and the finger has stopped bleeding, although Jonathan and I both look like we just came from Elm Street and we were the nightmare. The Very Young Doctor informs us that the black part of the skin will eventually fall off and the skin on the tip of the finger will grow back. Mind you, in the meantime my kid has to walk around with the top of his finger looking like the flat-top of Flava Flave. As of this writing, Elijah hasn't had one single occasion to go to the ER/Urgent Care/Poison Control/FBI/NSA/DEA/Secret Service. He is – wisely – learning from watching his brother.

We learned two things from this incident. One, "children's safety scissors" is an oxymoron, like "nonalcoholic beer" or "Microsoft Windows functionality". Two, there is absolutely nothing in the world of a 6-year-old boy that can't be cured by a Wendy's Frosty and the promise of zombie video games on the Xbox, maimed finger notwithstanding.