Ouch

It's those moments in parenting. The ones where we have to step up to the plate and be the Mom (or Dad) but we wanna cringe or cry or throw up (or all three). I hate those moments and we have had so many. Every big fall. Every mouth full of blood. Every black eye or bruise or surgery or whatever.

In this case it was a sprinkler head to the noggin.

Grace and her new bestie were wrestling at the bus stop. It's how they play and wrestling is probably putting it lightly. She got tackled, went down hard but they were in the grass so I breathed a sigh of relief. That is until I realized she had whacked the back of her head on a metal sprinkler head. She came over crying (and she's tough so it obviously hurt) so I rubbed her head to console her. I figured it was a bump and she would have a little bruise and be fine. My hand felt wet and I came up with a handful of blood. The back of her hair was soaked.

Those are the moments you want to cringe and cry and scoop them up. If I did that the panic she already was building would have been insane. So instead we calmly took her in (and she knew that if we were missing the bus it was bad) and tried to look at it. Unfortunately in those moments her anxiety and hyperactivity meld into a whirlwind of screaming and crying. It took a few minutes to calm her enough to look at it and it looked bad. She had cut a flap and it was bleeding like mad.

Thankfully my Mom, who studied nursing AND has raised 7 kids, was there and helped get the bleeding under control. While she probably could have stood to have a stitch or two my Mom (wordlessly) knew that a trip to the ER for stitches would create weeks of anxiety for Grace.

So after about a half and hour she was calmed down and the bleeding stopped. Thankfully she is a fast clotter like her Dad. So after she was calm and watching TV I wanted to cry. I hate when they get hurt and there is so little you can do. You know they'll remember "the time I fell and gashed my head open" and you want them to also remember "my Mom and my Honey made me better" and "later my Mom let me have oreo's AND fruit snacks with food coloring" NOT "my Mom was a nervous mess and clearly wanted to run away for a moment".

This parenting thing ain't easy.