Boo Boos

Yesterday as I was attempting to load the kids into the car for a trip to the Walton Elementary Book Fair and Cookout, I heard a small yelp and turned around to see Marty airborne in the driveway. He crashed to the ground hands first and started to cry, but when I picked him up I didn’t see any scrapes on his palms. He calmed himself down pretty quickly (I’m not sure where he picked that up, being surrounded by his dramatic sisters all the time) and wiped his nose on my shirt (of course). I looked all around the area where he fell, but I couldn’t find anything that could have caused him to stumble, let alone leave the ground completely. I asked him what happened but unfortunately though he is quite a talker, his powers of description are not what one would consider crystal clear. I didn’t see any point in continuing my investigation, so I went to buckle him in and saw that one of his knees looked pretty scraped up. There weren’t many red scrapes, but there were a lot of superficial white ones, and it looked like a bad enough injury to explain the snot on my shoulder, so off we went.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when the kids fall, I should be surprised that they don’t fall more often. At times it seems that one blade of grass leaning the wrong way in the lawn is enough to bring them down. Although they run in and out of their bedroom doors all the time, every once in a while they bang their head on the door knob, and I always ask, “how did that happen?” and they never know. When you buckle them in for a car ride, it seems like they should be safe for a while, provided that they don’t get car sick or choke on something, and yet while riding in the car one afternoon, Aislinn managed to get her lip caught in a barrette. Another afternoon she managed to get her arm caught between two car seats. If you put them in a padded room, they would probably manage to scrape their finger on the stitching. Then again, there are times when they are teetering with one leg in the air and the other foot halfway off the playground and somehow they manage to right themselves.

Since the kids began borrowing the neighbors’ trampoline, they have had the occasional turned ankle or bent knee (although those are nothing given the wide array of injuries that are possible on a trampoline). In the hierarchy of boo boos, these are the injuries that make the kids angriest, since there is no outward sign of them and nowhere to put a band-aid. They also don’t care for bumps and bruises, but at least they can show them off even if they can’t score a band-aid. Everyone’s favorite injury (once the pain has subsided) is a big knee scrape during shorts weather that can have a big Elmo band-aid. This injury can be described at length and shown to playmates, teachers, and neighbors to score some much desired attention and sympathy.

Bandages are another problem. Every kid I know loves band-aids and wants them to cover every teeny scrape that they find. One day I realized that I was wasting huge chunks of my life debating with the kids over which injuries needed covering and which didn’t, so now I just hand over the band-aid as soon as it’s requested. Unfortunately, somehow Aislinn convinced herself (and when I wasn’t looking, her sister and brother) that band-aids should never get wet. When she was little she would attempt to dodge her bath because she didn’t want the band-aid to get wet and bring about whatever horrible consequence that followed (now she only protests for a few seconds, or pulls the band-aid off before she gets in). When we finally got her in the tub, she would insist on keeping her knee (or finger or whatever part was bandaged) out of the water, and would give us nonstop instructions while washing her hair to make sure we didn’t splash the band-aid. I would sing the “I am stuck on Band-Aid brand cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me…” jingle for her, but she didn’t believe me (I’m hoping some sort of Johnson & Johnson anniversary will bring that commercial back, because if the kids see it on TV, maybe they’ll believe me). She would agree to keep her scrapes uncovered if we told her she was having a bath later that day, but once the band-aids were on, there was no taking them off.

I’m happy to say that I haven’t scraped my knees in quite some time. However, I can still remember what it’s like the night after you get a big scrape, when your knee is red and burning and sticking to the sheets so you can’t fall asleep. My two worst scrapes occurred when I was in high school, theoretically years past the time when I should be getting big scrapes. The first occurred when I fell on a gravel track during an ill-advised attempt to join the track team. It left me with a blue scar, caused I believe, by gravel dust that is still in my knee. For years afterward people would look at my knee and say “What happened?” and then look at me as if I had a screw loose when I said “That’s not a bruise, it’s a scar.” The other scrape occurred during an ill-advised attempt to work at an afterschool program with a bunch of punk kids. I was playing freeze tag with them and slipped on some gravel (gravel is not my friend) and gave myself a scrape on the leg that was about six inches long and three inches wide. I took this scrape with me to Beach Week, and although I was in a boozy exhausted haze most of the time, I took care of that scrape with the dedication of Florence Nightengale to ensure that I didn’t get another gross scar to match the gravel one. Later during Beach Week, I fell climbing over a fence and scraped my other knee which needed bandaging. By the last night some super funny drunk guy asked me if I had tripped a land mine.

But my experience at Beach Week isn’t really that unusual, since injuries for the kids seem to come in groups. One day last week Lauren hyperextended her knee on the trampoline, then banged her head on the door when she was coming back inside, and to round off the day, fell into the bathtub as she was brushing her teeth. Whenever the kids have a run like that, I begin to wonder “Do they need glasses? Do they need bigger shoes? Do they need smaller shoes? Do they need their inner ears examined?” But the next day, their coordination will return, and they’ll be back on their feet, balancing on curbs and jumping over rocks without any problems.

And sometimes the same injury happens over and over again. I suppose that can be a sign of bad parenting, but usually it is a sign that your kids aren’t heeding your sensible advice. One morning in Kentucky as I was standing in the kitchen, Lauren came running down the hallway in her socks and then attempted to make the turn into the kitchen. Her feet flailed under her like a cartoon character as she attempted to stop her momentum, but in the end it was just too slippery and she crashed into the door frame, producing a huge walnut-sized lump on her forehead. About a week later, Marty did the exact same thing, and ran his big dome into the exact same spot in the door frame to produce a matching lump on his forehead. We were surprised that none of the neighbors took us aside to suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t discipline the children my smacking them on the side of the head.

For all the bumps and bruises and falls, we have not had to take a child to the emergency room for stitches or broken bones. We’ve had several ear infections, one bug bite on the eye, and one “nursemaid’s elbow” that sent us to the hospital, but compared to some parents, we’ve definitely gotten off easy. While I was working at the book fair earlier this week, one kid came in with a walker and said he’d been in a motorcycle accident. Granted he was a punk fourth-grader and was probably sitting in his driveway when the motorcycle fell on him, but at least we are parenting well enough that our kids aren’t telling stories like that. Marty's leg looked much better this morning. In fact, the whole mess was reduced to one tiny scratch on his knee. He said it was painful, "This skyscraper is hurting my leg," but he never even asked for a band-aid.