Gwen Faces

Thanksgiving 2011

A collection of family memories from our 2011 thanksgiving trip to California. I know at least a few people who wanted to see these again. Enjoy.

Breaking News!

Our otherwise uneventful Saturday was rudely interrupted right before bedtime with a trip to the emergency room.

Levi was sliding around the kitchen floor with some new slippery flannel pajama pants that are big enough to hang over his feet. I think he was enjoying the ice-skating like sensation when suddenly the ground came up and attacked him. Completely unprovoked. I heard the thud and looked over to find him on his belly with his arms out in front of him. Even before he started crying it was obvious something was wrong with his right forearm. It wasn't anything too bad but definitely something was broken.

So we dropped everything (even left the cookie dough on pans waiting to go in the oven) and drove the 1 mile to the hospital. I guess it is times like these that we're happy to live right next to the hospital, and to have an ER that wasn't busy, and to have competent doctors. And in the interest of full disclosure it may have been a bit difficult for me to hold back the tears while carrying my own wounded kid through triage.

The diagnosis was pretty obvious, but the X-rays confirmed two broken bones in his right forearm.

You can see in the second X-ray how his arm was bent a bit. I'm still having flashbacks to the time my brother TJ broke his arm while we were roller skating. Same thing, except this time I was a tiny bit more help than to just say "Uh Dad, TJ won't stop crying."

After the X-ray Viv and Gwen went back home, and Levi was distracted enough by the movies on my phone to stop thinking about how much he doesn't like hospitals. 

Levi held up pretty well. He didn't like any of it (you could see it on his face) but he was silent while they helped him. They gave him the medication (ketamine, I think, so he was awake but not aware) and then had me step out so as not to faint while they did the reduction (seriously though, why does the medical field insist on using these counter-intuitive terms that force me to have to ask yet another question just to figure out that you're just aligning the bones). And when I got back this was what I saw.

Within minutes he was aware again, and they took another X-ray to make sure everything was ok and we went home (only 2.5 hours in total at the ER which was shorter than I expected). Once I got Levi in the car he was noticeably happier, and he wasn't tired even after giving him some pain medication so we watched movies until 1am like this.

Notice the smile. He was definitely in pain until the cast was on, but it also seems like the hospital was the main cause of the sadness. I don't blame him. By the time we were home he was back to his normal, talkative self. He slept well, and except for the obvious inconvenience of the cast he is doing fine.

In other news, Gwen learned how to roll over and snuck out two little teeth while nobody was looking.

Also, a few hours earlier when Levi still had two functional arms we discovered the grocery store now has kid grocery carts. Levi loved it. OK, I think that is the end of this long post.