Yesterday can be classified in the ‘not good’ department. Everything was going along just fine until Noah decided to cut down a box in the living room with a pair of brand new scissors. This is all fine, he’s competent with the scissors and had managed to mostly finish his project which, I guess, gave me a false sense of safety.

He was literally a foot behind me working diligently when I heard him start saying “no Addy” and she’s an inquisitive toddler so this is something we hear 100 times a day. We try to direct Noah to do his projects up in his room but I admit I usually don’t think of it until she starts trying to “help”. Why the warning bells didn’t ring when I heard him talking to her is beyond me. But next thing I know, she’s crying and he’s moving his project away from her. Again I think nothing - the cry wasn’t alarming or out of the ordinary for a Toddler Scorned. Then I saw the drops of blood.

Everywhere, blood flowing like a freakin’ fountain off my baby’s hand. I’m not real squeamish about blood unless it comes from one’s mouth but this was a LOT of blood. And have you ever tried to compress a baby’s finger? haha. Gooooood luck.

I was relieved that the amount of blood was not equivalent to the amount of hysteria experienced by the victim She really did not seem that hurt, just annoyed by the compressions that, incidentally, did not work. By the time we got a look at the wound a significant amount of time had gone by and it was still lightly bleeding. It’s a pretty bad one. She lost a fair amount of her fingertip to those new scissors. We finally decided we needed to bandage it up for the night just to keep it compressed and clean.

She was not happy. At all. It was not easy. At all. It took two entire attempts of four bandages each to get it on properly and securely. And that rendered her clumsy with her left hand. She’s still pretty ambidextrous so she spent the rest of the night angry that she could no longer do the things she’s accustomed to doing with her hands. Ugh.

But the real fun started after bedtime. She went to sleep without issue but then proceeded to wake up hourly or sooner completely hysterical. This isn’t like her at all so I knew something was up. She seemed to be in a lot of pain and also could not suck her thumb (don’t ask me why - it was her middle finger that was bandaged but apparently there is equal importance on all five fingers for the complete Thumbsucking Experience.

We had intended to keep the bandage on through the night but by midnight I couldn’t take it anymore and we decided to take it off. That helped marginally but she was still whiny and in pain so we gave her some pain meds. By this time it was beyond midnight and she was wide awake.

And then Noah woke up. “Is there a bear on the loose?” Um, no. But then he couldn’t get back to sleep either.

Finally around 1:30 or 2, everyone was back asleep. Addy seems just fine today, she has full dexterity back in her fingers and the ability to suck her thumb so while I’m walking around like a zombie, Addy has crashed for a very early nap to make up for all that lost sleep. Isn’t that always how it goes?

I feel terrible about the scissor incident. I could go without seeing blood like that, well, the rest of my life.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 10:28 am and is filed under Health, Parenting, Photos & Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.