Trauma

Sunday morning the kids and I were at Marie's house because we had spent the night. Nicole was having a bad morning. She refused to eat her breakfast and so I sent her to time out at the bottom of the stairs and went upstairs to pack up our stuff so we could go.

I was at the top of the stairs with a backpack, a purse, a duffle bag, and the portacrib in my hands. It was just then that the shoulder strap on the duffle bag decided to break. I bent down to retrieve the duffle and accidentally dropped the portacrib. It went sailing down the stairs at a speed that I did not think possible. It was like a bobsled going down the bobsleddy slide thing that bobsleds go down.

I grabbed for the playpen, but was too slow. I looked down the stairs in fear and saw both Nicole and Dan at the bottom of the stairs, because Dan was sitting with Nicole while she was in time out.

Being the "awesome" mom that I am and using really dumb logic, I yelled, "Look out! Look out!" knowing that there was nothing else that I could do to save my children from the portacrib sailing down the super steep flight of stairs.

My kids, being the wonderful 3 and 1 year old that they are, look up at me with innocent looks on their faces that say, "What Mama?" Just in time for the portacrib to smack right in to Nicole's face, knocking her off the stairs and onto the wood floor below.

I run down the stairs to my now screaming child. I pick her up, cradle her in my arms and look for injuries, only to see blood all over her face and hair. I have an immediate panic feeling in my chest. I am terrified. I look up to see Marie and Anthon standing there and I say, "I don't know what to do. What do I do?"

Marie and Anthon have calm heads and can actually think logically. Marie presses tissues to Nicole's head so that we can actually see where the blood is coming from. There is a small gash on Nicole's forehead and I panic again. My baby has a gash on her head! I feel like hyperventilating, I feel like crying, I feel guilt, I feel like I need Matt to tell me what to do because this mommy is ill prepared for this situation.

We clean her up, put some gauze on her and Anthon packs up the car so that I can head home. I get home, wake up Matt (because he had just got home from his 12 hour night shift) and have him look at Nicole's head because I am convinced that she need stitches but don't want to go to the emergency room unless I am absolutely sure because our copay is 300 dollars. I think the insurance company has astronomical copays to discourage you from going to the doctor. Evil. Stupid Obamacare.

Matt concurs with my need to go the doctor, but we head to Instacare instead. Matt is more familiar with head wounds than I am since he had them quite a few times as a child.

By this point, Nicole is not crying any more, but rather is ready to play and eating a sucker. Her calmness makes me calmer too. If she is ready to play, there is obviously no lasting damage.

Us at Instacare. We are all still in our pajamas and pacifiers were still in the mouth.

 The doctor looked at Nicole's head and decided that they could glue it shut rather than stitch it. I breathed a sigh of relief because I knew that stitches were going to be awful for her. Thank goodness someone invented skin glue.

Close up and out of focus picture of the gash. It doesn't look like much here, but it was pretty deep and man did it bleed a whole lot.

Dan and Matt at the doctor. Oh yeah, it was a family trip.

Nicole was freaked out by the chair that raised up high at the doctor's office, but other than that, she was a champ. She was convinced that she was going to fall off of the raised chair. Matt stood with her while the doctor glued her head shut and I managed the wild man Dan.

I didn't get an after shot with the glue in it, but it looked really wonky with glue bubbling out of the cut.

Nicole is okay and the cut is healing and hopefully there won't be much of a scar.

I did it, I survived our very first big kid trauma, though I still feel shaken by the whole event. I still feel guilty and my regular mommy worry meter is heightened to high alert.

I know that there are accidents and that kids get hurt, but I don't like it. Can't I just keep them in a bubble where they are safe and happy all the time? Being a parent is hard. If I didn't love my kids so stinking much, then maybe I wouldn't worry so much. But I do, I love them so much, and I worry about them all the time.

Hopefully, the next time this happens I will be calmer, I will know what to do and I will be a better Mommy. Not that I plan to send a portacrib down the stairs toward my children again, but I know that this will not be the last time that they get hurt.

Despite the fact that I am upset by the whole thing, at the same time, I am grateful. I am grateful that she wasn't more hurt. I am grateful that it only hit one of my children. And, as bad as it sounds, I am grateful that it hit the older child and not the younger one. If it had hit Dan, things could have been much worse.