Broken

July 7, 2010

This post is slightly out of order by about 3 weeks. Sorry.

My sweet 2 year old decided to jump off Tanner's bunk bed during naptime. He came into my room limping.  I of course, kissed him and sent him on his way like any good mother would do. By the next morning, he was still limping, but only here and there. I was pretty skeptical honestly. More like, in denial.  So, we went to the hospital for some x-rays.  2 year olds are amazing creatures. They can fool you for anything.  By the time we were in the elevator on our way to the x-ray machine, I was on the phone with my husband asking him if he remembered WHICH foot it was he was actually limping on.

Sure enough. Fracture into the growth plate in his leg, and one in his foot too. I took a pic with my lousy picture-taking cell phone.  Can you tell I got to pick the color of the cast?

A tangent...
That evening we got out of the orthopedics's office getting a cast on his leg. I picked up Derek and we went over to the mechanic's to pick up his car. On the way home we blew a tire in Derek's car. So we left the car on the side of the freeway and went to pick up the rest of the family. Then we headed over to Sam's Club to pick up 4 new tires since the full spare was already on the car from a previous blow a couple of weeks earlier. We arrived at Sam's Club at 7:02 pm and looked for someone to help us in the tire dept. We discovered that the tire guys leave at 7pm! Just our luck. I looked at my husband and said, "Well sweetheart, it's been a $2000 day. How about we get a pizza to top it off?" So, we walked a little further in and bought a pizza for dinner. Our kids were all starving for sure!

Despite our expensive day, I was grinning ear to ear as I watched Colin try to walk on his new cast. He was a hoot! The little guy just struggled to get from one place to another and did a lot of just staying put. With all the gray hairs this kid was putting on his mom, I was delighted to think he'd be enjoying some down time over the next 6 weeks. Little did I know...

The next day, he continued to wobble around in the morning, but by the afternoon, he was back to running. Bummer! That evening I dropped the kids off at a friend's home while Derek and I went to a Pathology dinner. When we returned I walked in to see Colin JUMPING on their little exercise trampoline. Yes, just 24 hours.  That's all the "down time" I got.

On day two of his cast I went in to check on Tanner and Colin during naptime. They were playing nicely on the floor together. I noticed, however, that the safety bar from Tanner's bunk was on the floor so I asked Tanner about it. "Colin did it mom." I'm thinking at this point, the whole reason Colin broke his leg in the first place is because he didn't know how to climb down.  Hence posed the next question: "How did he get down?" Tanner matter-of-factly replied: "He just grabbed the sheets and slid off the side". Tarzan. That's my boy!

That night when Derek came home we took apart the bunk beds.

One week later. Exactly.  Colin started crawling and bawling.  His behavior was significantly worse than when he had actually broken his leg.  I was really worried that he had hurt it somehow. We took him in and they took the cast off. He had several blisters on his foot with one about the size of a quarter on his little heal. The Nurse Practitioner decided to go with a walking cast for him instead. This would enable me to treat the blisters. It also took a great load off my shoulders as we were just about to embark on our journey to Utah and I knew there would be a lot of water involved in our summertime fun.

My favorite was the GOLD emblem across the back of his boot:

 Ain't that the truth!