Tough Weekend for Scotty

Crash on the driveway
We had just come back from ordering Scott's birthday cake at Dairy Queen and the kids were playing on the driveway for a few minutes before bedtime. Scott tired of coasting down the driveway on Katie's new training bike, so he had switched to her little toddler buggy thing, eventually turning it around to ride it backwards. That's when things went badly.

When he went down the curb the buggy stopped short and Scott flipped forward, smacking his face on the asphalt before he could raise his arms up to break his fall. I think it was just as painful as it looked, because he immediately began to scream. He had scraped some skin off his forhead and it looked like he had scratches beside his nose. I continued to examine him as I carried him into the house and was relieved to see that his mouth and teeth seemed fine.

I sat him on the kitchen counter near the sink and we wiped away the dirt with a cloth and I could see that he had a bit of blood in both nostrils, but his nose wasn't really bleeding. He was really, really sad about getting hurt, but it seemed that he was alright. We gave him a tylenol and some frozen yogurt, let him watch a cartoon and then daubed him with Polysporin before putting him in bed.



Incident at Church
Aside from several prominent scrapes on his face, Scott seemed fine the next morning. He complained a bit about his stomach, but that seems to be a daily occurrence lately (he says something about his stomach almost every night before bed). I guess we should have paid closer attention. After a lunch of chili and yogurt tubes, Scott was settling into playing cars in front of the pew at church, when suddenly R noticed him get up from his knees and sit on the pew.

Part way through the first verse of the sacrament hymn, I heard R calling my name. I looked over to see the tail end of Scott vomiting violently onto his lap and the floor in front of him. I had hardly registered what was happening when he wretched again with unbelievable power and distance (I found out later that the spray cleared the back of the pew ahead of us and landed on a little boy sitting there). I yanked off my suit jacket and reached out to pick him up when he let fly with his last salvo, right into my chest.

I carried him out to the bathroom to start cleaning up the mess. Fortunately, he had emptied the reservoir, so there were no further outburts. In fact, once purged, he was surprisingly chipper and even started cracking silly jokes there in the bathroom. Before we went home, I returned to the chapel briefly to get my jacket and car keys, but first rolled up my sleeves to hit the most of the chili stains.

This was the second time I had worn that shirt, having just pulled it out of the package earlier in the week. We can now consider it well broken-in. Once at home, I removed my tie and threw it in the garbage -- I had never really liked that tie anyway.

Before we left to church I had noticed a chili stain on the side of Scott's white shirt. I had him wear his black blazer to church so that the stain wouldn't show (that is a classic Dad move, if there ever was one). Well, the chili stains still showed, since they were now all over the front of the jacket, shirt and tie he wore.

Poor Scotty. What a weekend. Hopefully the scratches start to heal a little bit before his birthday party.