Did I say No Disasters?

Okay, I might have been a bit premature in my last post. You know, the one where I said that this summer had, for a succession of reasons, been especially stressful - but that none of those reasons were actual disasters. I say this because, within twenty-four hours of typing that, Secondborn - who was supposed to be going to sleep in his bed - managed to fall off the bed and whack himself in the left eye. Neither of us were in the room when it happened; the Beautiful Wife got in there first, and her best guess is that he was trying to reach something on the shelves by standing on the railing of the bed, and slipped.

So: pow. Upset boy, both parents in the room, immediate inspection of two-year-old.

My first impression was that he was hurt - because, you know, he was still crying, and he only does that if he's actually in pain - but probably not badly. He had a little blood in his mouth, so he'd probably bitten his lip or his cheek, but nothing too serious.

Then I noticed a spot of blood up on his cheekbone, just below his eye. That didn't come from his mouth... I looked more closely, and saw that he had a deep, curved gash there. Also, his eye was starting to puff up. This was going to need stitches.

The real hero of the night was Firstborn, who got himself dressed in time to help hold the ice-filled wash-cloth on his brother's face so that Mommy and Daddy could pull on clothes. Then we dumped everyone in the car and drove calmly down to the emergency room, because if there's one thing I refuse to do, it's making a bad situation worse by trying to hurry. At the emergency room, Firstborn promised to give Secondborn his feather if he could be good while they were there.

The doctor put three stitches in the cut, and told us to come back in six days and have them taken out. Secondborn was very brave about it. So was Firstborn, actually, though in his case the bravery was expressed by sitting on the chair and playing Fruit Ninja while his brother screamed a little bit, when he could reasonably have been freaking out instead.

Then both boys got popsicles and we all went home. I think some sort of reward is in order, particularly for Firstborn. For a six-year-old, he handled himself very well.

It's probably worth stopping to note that... well, let me put it this way: this is my Happily Ever After. I found the woman of my dreams, I married her, and now we're living Happily Ever After. But Happily Ever After doesn't mean that nothing ever goes wrong. It means that when something does go wrong, we pull together and get through it. In a romance, the wedding is often the end of the story - but it's also the start of another story, potentially richer and more complex than the courtship ever was.