I'm just going to start adding Minor Injury to the kids' back-to-school lists:
Lex has broken his arm at school three times; 1) in kindergarten by jumping off the top of a chain-link fence and landing on his elbow, 2) in second grade by just standing there on the blacktop at recess and falling over and landing badly (that was surprisingly gruesome), and 3) rebreaking that same arm just days after the cast came off when he fell off the little curb thing around the planter box garden deelio.
Sophie tried to one up him by having a tetherball accident on the second day of school, but she loses because it was only a sprain. What happened? There are a couple of versions that she tells, but the main theme is that the ball was coming at her, she went to smack it, she missed, and the rope wrapped around her arm forty six times and she heard a 'pop.'
The nurse called me a little while after it happened and said that Soph was sure it was broken, but that she (the nurse) thought that it was probably ok and so she'd iced it and sent Soph back to class. I got a call a little while later because Sophie was back in the office right before school let out, but I am heartless and also very stingy with my PTO and so I just had her go to after school care, picked her up after work, took her grocery shopping with me and Willow while SG took the boys to get school supplies, made her eat the dinner that I cooked that took an HOUR longer than Martha said it would which I *totally* should have seen coming because since WHEN do chicken thighs cook in the oven in 20 minutes? SINCE NEVER, MARTHA, and then -- after all that -- then I took her to the emergency room because she had managed to keep looking pathetic and wan all evening even though she could totally move all her arm and hand parts and there was zero swelling and zero bruising and MUCH interest in a cast and having all her friends sign it.
I'm not saying that her arm didn't hurt. I am saying that she was milking it. She may even have been imagining herself in a hospital bed, her arm in a cast and in traction; her adoring family and friends at her bedside with candy and flowers and sharpie pens, patiently awaiting their turn to sign her cast. Or maybe that's the daydream *I* used to have when I was seven or eight and tried to break my own ankle by jumping off my bed with my foot twisted. I've still never broken a bone, but I have spent enough time in the hospital to not ever want that sort of attention again.
Our trip to the ER was quick (one hour, fifteen minutes, door to door) and did you know that if you pay your ER copay right then and there rather than have them send a bill, it is $20 less? That's especially good if you have to go see the pediatrician the next morning and hand over a $20 copay for them to tell you that the hospital's radiologist hasn't been bothered to look at the 11 hour old x-rays yet. The doctor was very kind, but what a totally unnecessary visit that was.
In the ER waiting room, there was this youngish dad with three little girls. The littlest of them sat by me and looked at me and moved every single part of her body except her eyes while she grilled me on my favorite characters from The Lion King. I'd had a long day, and it was past my bedtime and I was getting a little nutty with all the wiggling about in my personal space, and then the dad got chatty. I'm not usually a mean person, but right then I was trying to send him a vibe to get him to stop with the small talk. It didn't work, so we (we=the waiting room full of people) all got to hear about his wife's ovaries, and how they hurt, and she couldn't stand it and that was why they were there. I made a face, because, you know, painful ovaries, ouch; so then HE started telling new people about his wife's painful ovaries and how he didn't know much about that because it's a Woman's Thing, but that SHE (and here he pointed to me) says that is really, really BAD. At this point I just decided to give up on not talking to the other waiters, and so I looked at the man he was talking to and slowly nodded in agreement, It's really very BAD, I whispered.
Then the dad told us all about his own tetherball story: This one time? He was at the school and nobody else was there and there was the tetherball pole, with just the hook hanging down and no ball on the end. So he gets this idea that he needs to roundhouse kick the tetherball hook (here I was thinking, Dude, you are no Chuck Norris) and before he even knew it, the rope had whipped around his leg, leaving him hanging helplessly upside down with NOBODY there to help him.
I looked at him.
Instead of calling bullshit, I asked him how he got down. I am not making this next part up. I promise. He said, I don't know -- I guess I had the will to live.
I was actually more interested in details of the escape, but whatever. Will To Live, it is. You know how before I said that I am not mean? It's most likely true, because right now I feel really bad for talking behind this guy's back. Maybe it DID happen, and maybe it was solely his Will To Live that saved him from hanging upside down until he passed out and birds ate him or something.
Anyway. My point is that tetherball is evil. If it's not almost breaking your arm or stringing you up like a bear trap, it's smacking you in the face. Sophie is fine. She was even able to be the Lunch Lady at school today.
Want a corn dog?
