This past week, one of those extra nights was occupied by Xander injuring himself. He's totally fine, but the event was just scary enough for all of us that it reminds us just how lucky we are. I mean, up until now, Xander has only hurt himself to the point of needing a doctor one time. He had taken a nosedive from the couch right into the coffee table when he was about a year and a half, and he still has the tiny scar over his eyebrow to prove it.
So one night last week, he was cleaning up his toys in the living room. He was talking to me as he worked, and was walking backwards. Not paying attention to where he was going, he tripped over a toy and fell back into the brick fireplace, and of course his head hit the sharp corner. Now, one thing about me: I'm not calm in situations where my child is bleeding. I mean, I can act calm enough in front of the child, so as not to make him completely panic, but inside I'm a mess. It causes me to lose all sense, and I find myself not knowing what to do. It's really not a good feeling to have, and I need to work on it seeing as how I'm the mother of two boys and will inevitably need to keep my wits about me the next two dozen times one of them hurts himself.
Xander's head started bleeding, so immediately I ran to get Andy. Once Andy was involved in the situation, I took a backseat. In fact, Andy told me to back away because he didn't want me scaring Xander (guess I didn't have much of a poker face once I caught sight of the back of his head!). We put ice on it, got the bleeding to slow down considerably, checked for a concussion, all that fun stuff. While we were both keeping him calm, Xander wanted to know if he would ever stop bleeding. After he continued to ask questions, Andy finally explained that he would form a scab on the back of his head. Well, that just opened up a whole new can of worms. Suddenly all Xander cared about was the scab. I tried telling him what a scab was, and described that it was "crusty stuff" that covers a boo-boo and makes it heal up. So now Xander was crying in fear over having "crusty stuff" on his head. It's so hard to know what will calm him down and what will freak him out more sometimes.
By the time he went to school the next day he was proud to show off his scrape. I think he pretty much showed or explained it to anybody who was willing to listen. He did a really good job of forgetting about it, and not fixating on the scab when it did, in fact, form. I was glad that was over with.
Then, on Sunday evening, he skinned his knee. A common occurrence for little boys, right? Well, not for Xander. He has really only fallen and scraped himself once before, and I believe he was too young to remember that. So the new obsession, once the Band-Aid was on and the bleeding had stopped, became not disturbing the knee. He was very paranoid about making it hurt again. Turns out he had applied his Band-Aid all by himself, which resulted in him placing some of the adhesive on the actual cut, so no wonder the thing still bothered him as much as it did. It's been two days since he scraped it, but he still gets upset when I try to help him, say, put his pants on, because he's worried that I'll perhaps rip off all the skin by sliding up his pants. I thought boys were supposed to be all tough and eat worms and all that good stuff. Xander is in a class by himself.
Then came last night. Xander was getting ready for bed and Andy was combing his hair down because it gets all crazy and big if we don't try and tame it. Suddenly, Andy asked me where the matches were. Hmm. Why would you need a match to comb the kid's hair? "Does he have a tick?" I asked Andy. Turns out he did. Andy managed to get it out without Xander even knowing what a tick was. Why make him freak out when we didn't need to? We explained it to him after the tick was safely gone, and he took it well, luckily. I just hope that this marks the end of the Xander mishaps for a while. They say bad things come in threes, right? So he should be good for now, I think. At least, I hope!
I do have a picture of Xander's bloody head, actually, but I figured that nobody really wants to see it. Instead, I thought I'd post a cute picture of Evan, since I haven't even mentioned him this whole post. Here you go!
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