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  Last night at I sat joking with my kids I noticed people looking at me funny.  I looked down and realized I was covered in blood.  My first thought was…this will make a good blog post

So let me tell you a funny story (except it's not funny at all) about staying calm.  My husband had to travel for work this week.  Normally he drives himself to the airport but I took him this time because my car was going to be in the shop for a few days and I needed his car.  His flight was coming in around 11 last night and I needed to go pick him up.  The tricky part was figuring out what to do with the kids.  A sitter at midnight on a school night/week night was out of the question so I had to take the kids with me.  This brought up the question of what to do with them until we needed to leave at 10:30 p.m.  Put them to bed and wake them up?  Give them a nap and then let them stay up late?  Go to a late movie? I opted to give them a nap and let them stay up. The kids were super excited for our adventure to go pick up daddy at the airport, so I made a night of it, making snacks and renting movies and making a fort in the living room.

Everything was going according to plan until about 5 minutes before we needed to leave.  The boys were playing catch with some stupid little plastic toy and I heard Ben yell "ready!" and then next sound I heard was crying. Ben ran to me and buried his head in my lap while I scolded Matthew for hitting him with the toy.  About a minute later I pulled him back to ask what had happened and noticed the blood. Lots of blood.

I tried not to panic and went calmly about sitting him on the counter, wiping off the gushing blood while trying to get a good look. Let me tell you, gushing blood, one screaming kid and one terrified kid is no fun when you're home alone.  But I knew I was the only one there and I had to step up to the plate and deal with it.  When I realized it was pretty badly cut and I was nowhere near a phone I enlisted Matthew to hold pressure on it while I called the doctor.  The doctor's office wasn't sure what to tell me. It was borderline…not gaping enough to see his brains but not little enough to know a band aid. 

I still wasn't sure what to do (and remember, we were supposed to be picking Mike up in an hour) so, being the social media freak that I am, I took a picture and posted it to Facebook asking anyone online at 10:30 p.m. for opinions on whether it needed stitches.  My network of nearly 500 friends, most of them moms, came through for me and told me to take him in. 

So I did what any good mom would do. Asked Matthew to keep applying pressure while I dutifully packed snacks and drinks (I know how long those ER visits can get) and texted my husband to tell him to take a cab and meet us at the hospital. 

I think it's important, as a mom, to learn how to be calm in otherwise uncalm situations.  I'm luckily that my own mom is a nurse, so she was always calm.  She never panicked or freaked out. When my brother broke his arm (badly!) she calmly stuck him in the car and took him to the hospital. When my father nearly got killed when a tire exploded in our garage, she urgently but calmly told us to get the hell over to our neighbors house right that very minute.   She always had the "you'll be fine" attitude and I think I learned that from her. I'm so thankful for that. It really comes in handy at 11 p.m. on Thursday nights when your kids has a gushing head wound

So we trotted off to the hospital, and after one quick look they declared that it did indeed need stiches (five of them!) and got him in a room to get all sewed up. Can I just say how thankful I am that we live in a city with such a fabulous Children's Hospital. We should really all count our blessings on that front.

My husband arrived and the poor boys were so tired (by this time it was after midnight).  As much as I wanted him to stay, to share the emotional burden of watching Ben get stiches, I knew the better thing to do was to send them out to the car so Matthew could fall asleep.  So I sent them away (and I'm glad I did, Matthew would have been traumatized by seeing his brother go through that).  I was left alone to once again deal with a scared, screaming child.  The numbing medicine they gave him didn't seem to help much and after the first stich he was freaking out and screaming so badly they had to bring in a guy to hold him down. They wrapped him a tight swaddle and he held him.  I stook there, unable to do anything but talk to him camly and watch and he screamed so hard he couldn't breathe.  It was emotionally heartbreaking, knowing my child is in so much pain and so scared yet I can do nothing. Five stiches later it was 1 a.m. and we were headed home.

Super Ben is back in action this morning, no worse for the wear. He was actually excited to go to school (after sleeping in nice and late) and show his friends his stiches and tell them the story.  Mom, on the other hand, feels like an emotional truck ran her over.  I'll be fine, though, and so will he.

Staying calm is such an important trait for a mom to have and I'm glad I was able to. I'm sure this won't be our last trip to the ER.

They say that chicks dig scars and this morning, I'm hoping that's true.

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