Our first trip to the ER

Well, we knew it would happen eventually, we were just hoping it would take a little more time.  Yes, Nathan managed to make it to the ER before his 3rd birthday.  I’ve avoided a couple of trips already by just patching him up at home, but there was no way I could fix this one on my own (even if I do have an ER nurse for a mom!).

We actually got to know Bartlett Lake pretty well in the last little bit.  We went camping there just two weeks ago.  Here’s a picture of all the kids crammed in with all the camping gear.  If they get much bigger we’re either going to need a larger vehicle to go camping or a more inventive way of packing everything!

We had a great time at the lake this weekend though.  It was for our annual Mother’s Day hike with Dwayne’s family (yes, I know it was a week late.  That’s just the way it worked out).  Dwayne’s parents brought their two seat kayak and Dwayne spent most of the day in it paddling around with whoever wanted to go.  The kids loved it.  The kids played in the water and we sat in the shade.

 

 

 

 

If you look way up in the back of this picture you can see the ramadas with picnic tables where we ate our lunch.  That’s where the “incident” took place. While we were packing up and getting ready to leave Nathan of course managed to run off where we couldn’t see him.  Jan found him up at the bathrooms and brought him back.  I put him in timeout on the picnic table for running off and started changing the babies diaper.  Well Nathan decided to sit there for a short bit then he felt like he was done so he got up and started walking off.  So I grabbed him and set him back on the picnic bench and told him to sit there until I could deal with him and turned to finish with the babies diaper.  Well that’s when we went from this:

To this:

I saw him lean backwards out of the corner of my eye and before I could grab him it was too late.  He toppled under the picnic table and hit the back of his head on the metal plate connected to the picnic table leg.  It was a clean DEEP slice.  Dwayne and his mom managed to get a nice bandage on it and stop the bleeding.  While we finished packing up we decided that we would all go to the ER and drop off Nathan, Dwayne, and me and then Dwayne’s mom would take our van and drive the rest of the  kids to our house and take care of them until we were done.  As we were driving away from the lake the road is pretty curvy and on the way in Rebekah had said that she was feeling a little car sick.  Well she must have been dehydrated from playing all day in the sun and not drinking enough fluids, because as we went out on the curvy road she suddenly decided to throw up all over herself (she got sick again eating dinner later too).  With nothing else we could do we pulled over got a couple of the towels out, covered up her seat with one and wiped her down as best we could with other and went on our way.  I felt horrible, but couldn’t think of anything else to do as we were in a hurry.  Fortunately, they all fell asleep after that and provided her with some relief.

There is a children’s ER very close to our house and we were able to get right in.  They took very good care of Nathan and the doctor was very good about explaining everything and answering all of our questions.  So it was actually a good experience considering why we were there.  A funny side note: I must have been more frazzled than I thought I was, because when I checked Nathan in I put the wrong middle name down and didn’t notice until they printed the arm band.  I don’t even remember doing it! 

So by that night Cassandra had a fever, Rebekah was dehydrated and sick, and Nathan had four staples in the back of his head.  And the one kid who had nothing wrong with, I took in to see the orthopedic surgeon yesterday to see about scheduling the surgery for his trigger thumb!

As an update: all of the kids seem to be doing fine now.  Cassandra’s temp is down, Rebekah went to school yesterday and today and is feeling better, and Nathan?  Well, he’s just his normal self and is trying to make me nuts by running around and doing crazy things like climbing on the table and running full blast everywhere!  The whole time he only cried when he first hit his head and then when they had to give him the numbing shots.  After that he was more mad they were in his way when they stapled his head shut and he couldn’t see SpongeBob on the TV.  And as soon as I get an exact date for Isaac’s surgery I’ll post that.  Now if you’d like to see a picture of Nathan’s “owie” I’ll put it on here.  If not don’t scroll down then you don’t have to see it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is what it looks like today: