bumps and bruises and fractures, oh my...

why is it that i sit down to put in a post and the kids immediately start BOTHERING ME??? apparently it's lunch time and they're starving.

i'm letting them eat one cookie, just so i can do this. elisha is asleep and i have a fullish battery on the laptop so here we go...

the trip to tampa was good. as good as it could be for a mom trapped in the car with 3 kids for over 3 hours...one way. everything worked out well for the most part. we didn't get lost, our hotel room was ready & waiting for us, our friends were just lovely, and no one died. so i'd say it was a very good trip.

something scary happened, however, and i'm so relieved that i was surrounded by friends who are also mommies. elisha was sitting at the kitchen table in steph's house and i was feeding her sliced grapes as dinner was being prepared. elisha sat down into the chair from a kneeling position and her butt and body slid right through the chair (the chair's design had 2 horizontal slats at the top of the back but it was open space from the lowest slat to the seat of the chair) and flat onto steph's ceramic tile floor. elisha opened her mouth to scream and took such a deep breath that she passed out as i picked her up. her eyes rolled back in her head and i immediately thought concussion.

she came to a minute later and then she really began screaming. she had had the wind knocked out of her; my other friend, misti, said she landed back first and not head first as i had thought. but that didn't keep elisha from screaming herself to sleep, then waking up to vomit all over herself during our evening meal, which is concussion-like behavior i think. elisha continued to improve and return to her old self over the next hour, and since misti is practically certified in head trauma in children, we skipped an ER visit. all seems to be back to normal for miss elisha...she's actually started adding quite a few words into her vocabulary that weren't there before tampa. now she says "stuck", "down", and she barks like a dog when she sees one.

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and since rob is still deployed, of course, one of the other children must get injured as well.

cade fell out of bed overnight thursday night. when he woke up whining & crying & refusing to eat, i knew a doctor's appointment would be in the works. with it being friday, i did not want to go all weekend without knowing what was ailing him. thankfully we got him into the doctor's early and the nurse practictioner sent us to a jacksonville hospital for xrays, she suspected a fractured or broken clavicle (collarbone). turns out it was fractured and the next stop was to go get a brace or splint from a medical supply store and bring it back to the local doc's office to get him fitted.

here's where i started getting annoyed. the medical supply store was about 5 miles beyond the doctor's office, through heavy fast traffic. the first brace they sold us was a shoulder immobilizer and we had to go all the way to the doc's office to find that out that it was not the right one. so, back to the medical supply store where one of the salesladies was the most worthless lump i had ever seen. she didn't know anything about anything. the other saleslady was a lot more knowledgeable and managed to find an extra small adult clavicle brace that would fit cade. and it was even $4 cheaper than the immobilizer. :)

so back to the doctor's to check the fit, and after more stickers and suckers for cade & elisha, we were done and home we went. reese had been picked up at the bus stop by a neighbor, so we stopped & got her and then went home to collapse. i was about in tears at several points during the day, just frustrated with having to make so many different stops to get what we needed. cade was just wonderful all day. he didn't complain about the pain or having to go see all these new strange places, he just collected the stickers as he went. the final tally at the end of the day: 6 big ones!

monday afternoon we have an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon for more specialized information. hopefully they'll have a child-sized brace, b/c the one that cade has keeps slipping off. he's supposed to sleep in it but he whines that it's uncomfortable so last night i let him go without.

turns out he'll always have a bump in his collarbone from this adventure. apparently it never mends perfectly no matter how much milk you drink. and the collarbone is one of the easiest bones to break. the nurse practitioner said that his injury was one that is common in newborn babies, when they are squeezed through the birth canal.

so now reese is due for some kind of injury, i'm just suprised that it hasn't happened yet.

or it could be me who's next. i'm already sporting a big yellow bruise on my forehead (from bumping my head on the cart at walmart while loading the lower rack) and a huge lumpy bruise on my shin from walking right into the playscape at the local playground.

it's probably good that active duty military gets such complete health care coverage. we will probably need it a lot.