ER Trip #2, #3 and #4

You may be asking yourself how does a girl like me with 4 boys has never had to go to the doctor. Well, my first recommendation is to get all those doctor visits out of the way in one fail swoop. As in a week or so of each other. Saves you SO much time!! And all the rest of the time you can just sit back and feel so awesome that you never have to take a bleeding child to the doctor.

So here is ER story #2. It was Kai, again! I was gone picking up Ronin from school... Kai is running around like a crazy person at home and bashes his eyebrow on the corner of his closet and gashes it open. I get a phone call from Analyn telling me he is bleeding all over (not my favorite kind of phone call to get). I try to hurry home and when I finally get there figure I better head to the ER. Those great doctors stitch us right up. It took all night be we got it done, and all is well.

Fast forward 2 weeks... one saturday morning, I am gone grocery shopping... (I know, the classic start) Patrick and the big boys were down stairs swimming. Cache fell in his slippery wet swim shorts and cracked his chin on the slide. It was a pretty big gash but not so scary that it was deemed it an emergency. I finally got home and we decided (that is all the adults in the house plus Grandma) that instead of taking this poor kid to the ER we could just superglue that cut shut. So we did.

Fast forward 2 hours. (Only 2 hours!) Baby Levi is innocently playing in the office when Kai walks past him and pushes him into the bookshelf. Levi cracks his forehead open on one of the shelves and is gushing blood. The one time I am actually there to witness it and I am falling apart screaming "the baby is bleeding" as I run through the house with him in my arms. In total doctor mode, Patrick, Grandma and I strap him to the table and glue his cut shut. Case closed, we are awesome.

Fast forward 7 more days. Baby Levi has pulled his bandage off multiple times and it is clear things are not going well. We (us super smart adults) decide its probably best for him to go in and get things sorted out. So our (I mean MY) 3rd trip to the ER starts. Poor baby Levi's cut has healed to the point that they need to sedate him, reopen the wound and properly stitch it up. I totally thought I could handle staying in to watch it, but the doctor was so right to have me stand outside. It was a lot harder to take than I thought. Here is baby hopped up on sedative meds. It was a little funny and a little scary to see him so out of it. He kept waving to the nurses and saying "heeelllloooo" They thought it was super cute. Then he started climbing out of the bed and I couldn't hold onto his big, heavy out-of-control body. I sat trying to hold him down for 15 min while the sedation wore off.

He finally got stitched up and we were headed home. The doctor gave him 5 stitches that would dissolve but after another 2 weeks I had to pull them out and they left Frankenstein marks on his forehead. We will see how well the scar fades through the years.

Sooo, fast forward another 2 days from ER trip # 3. We check Cache's chin and its looking as bad as Levi's was. It obviously had healed with the wound open and we then decided that I should take him back in to get properly stitched up. He only had to get 2 stitches and gratefully the scar is hidden under his chin so you can't tell what a Frankenstein he turned out to be.

So, my words of advise, if you happen to have kids with large gaping wounds.... take them to the ER right away! Get them stitched up all at one time and save yourself the trouble!

Of course, we did learn a bit and know now that we can be super awesome doctors in the future. Just never glue a cut if its on the chin or on a baby under the age of 3. Or in other words, just take them in to get stitched up by a professional!