Hilarity Did Not Ensue

As you may have picked up from recent posts, the Red Menace has been a touch of a handful as of late. For the last 3 1/2 years, actually, but she's really doubled down these past few months. Monday was a career highlight for her; we were getting ready to go to school and she somehow managed to take a header out of her car seat into the driveway. I still don't know exactly what happened - I was moving a case of Trader Joe's wine (shut up) out of the back seat to make room for carpool when all of a sudden I hear shrieking. Fortunately she mostly landed in the yard but the poor kid still banged her noggin up pretty good on the concrete and was bleeding like a stuck pig; she and I both looked like something out of "Carrie" by the time I got her inside the house. Because my children tend to handle big stuff well and save the serious dramatics for things that don't at all matter ("that is the WRONG PLATE!", "this shirt has a tag!", that sort of thing) she calmed down pretty quickly, so I checked her out, got the bleeding to stop and cleaned both of us up. This was no mean feat given that the blood had soaked all the way through my bra, but we still made it out the door and to school on time. I get a phone call maybe 15 minutes later - or however long it takes to report someone to DFCS, I'm assuming - from the RM's teacher: "um, no, you need to take this child to the hospital...." so I very shamefacedly headed back to school and picked her up.

oh my heavens, you shouldn't have! No, really...well, alright. Gosh. Thanks!

 

In my defense, I come by this failure to panic honestly - both my parents are known far and wide (or at least to my sister and me) as truly pitiless creatures. Cslos and I learned early on that if we went to my father with a cut or bruise his immediate response would not be to check it out and make sure that we were okay, but to instead feign sympathy until he could get close enough to really mash on it and then run away laughing. And this man is a physician. Mom is even worse. I remember one time when Cslos was two years old and fell off of her bed; Mom gave her a quick once-over, decided she was fine and went about her day. When Dad came home later that evening Mom casually mentioned "oh, the little one cut her head this morning...". Dad took one look at Cslos's scalp and said "you've been letting this child walk around all day with her skull exposed." So yeah, by those standards I'm damn Florence Nightingale.

 

Anyway, off to the Emergency Room we went. The RM was confused and concerned about why she had to leave school but perked right on up when she realized she was going to get to meet a bunch of new people. This wasn't a hospital, it was a fresh crowd - the Catskills to her Shecky Greene. Plus she got to play with my iPad - what's not to love? As soon as the doctor came in to check her out, the RM starts "first of all, I'm a girl, not a boy. I don't really like boys. Although Daddy's a boy, and I like him mostly, and also Papa and there's also a mister man at Publix I like who gives me some balloon." "Aha," says the doctor, "and how do you feel?" "Well, I will tell you I had a tummy ache yesterday but I had a poo-poo and I felt better. A big poo-poo. A POND of poo-poo. Frogs don't live in a pond of poo-poo, that would be gross." And so on. Throughout the course of our significant stay, she also informed the staff that her father has lots of gas (TRUE), I am in a circus (NOT TRUE, technically) and she has a dog named Sweet Cherry Pie (NOT TRUE and KIND OF GROSS).

She was fine. No concussion, no stitches - just a little bit of skin glue and she was good to go.

she went ahead and got a little Botox while she was there. Never too early to start with the fillers if you want to avoid the Like Perry forehead, I say

I was enormously relieved that she was fine and that I wasn't going to have to explain to her teachers why I'd tried to dump a kid with a fractured skull at school - merely a flesh wound. That can't be worthy of criminal charges. She was nonplussed. The only time she got even remotely upset was when her hospital bracelet became a bit unwound. Typical RM. She stopped fussing when I told her we could go to Publix and get some balloon from a mister man. I stopped fussing when I got home and got into that case of TJ's wine. Shut up.