The Injury (For Lack of a More Creative Title)

The kids (mainly the girls) will resort to almost anything to postpone their nighttime slumber. Tate sneaks out of his room as well, but he just isn't as creative with his reasons.

The girls come find us to tell us about spiders/bugs in their room. They want to give us just one more kiss. They are scared that a stranger will scale the 2 story wall outside their window and climb in. And, of course, they have somehow injured themselves and need immediate attention. This mainly consists of a tiny scratch invisible to the naked eye.

The injuries, severe or mild, annoy me the most I think. For the simple fact of how in the world does one injure themselves if they are lying down in their bed, under the covers like they are supposed to be? Obviously, there is horsing around going on for one of them to get injured.

Last night I had them all in bed before 8:00pm. I started the dishwasher, then settled into my bed with my book. David was out of town so I had at least a couple hours of uninterrupted reading. Blissful.

I had already been in the girls' room a couple times to tell them to settle down and quit jumping from bed to bed.

As I started reading, I remembered that Reese hadn't prayed for her missionaries yet. She has to pray for a set of missionaries everyday for a week to get signed off on that particular step in her AWANA book. So I called her into my room to say her prayer. Drue followed.

After she finished she lingered for a few seconds longer and Drue ran on ahead back to their room. I heard a loud crash then crying. I didn't jump up immediately because my first thought was, "I told them to stop jumping from bed to bed." Isn't that terrible?

Her crying came closer as Drue made her way into my room. I expected to see a big, purple goose egg forming on her noggin but instead, she was holding her mouth with both hands. "This isn't going to be pretty," I thought.

I gently pulled her hands away and saw her little mouth filled with blood. I told Reese to go back to her room, but not before her curiosity got the best of her and she peeked around and saw the blood. She immediately started crying too and ran off. Great. I hadn't wanted her to freak Drue out more.

I ended up calling her back in to bring us a rag for Drue to spit all her blood out onto. She came right away. I also asked her to go grab some ice for us, forgetting that I had already turned all the downstairs lights off. She ran down there anyway, turning on the lights as she went.

After I got her cleaned up and iced up, I surveyed the damage a little more closely. At first, I thought her tooth had gone straight through her top lip. Turns out, she did have a fat lip that was mangled from the inside, however just a small cut on the outside, most likely from the bed frame.

Oh yeah, and she wasn't jumping from bed to bed. She ran into the room before Reese so she could hide under Reese's bed and scare her. But on her way down to the ground, she smashed her face instead.

I wanted to cheer Drue up post haste, so we gave David a quick call so she could tell him good night. After I explained to him what happened he said, "I know something that would be good for that...a popsicle". Drue's eyes lit up at that idea and she smiled. Of course, Reese got one two and they ate them in my bed. After they finished Reese pled her case of why she felt they both needed to sleep in my bed with me.

I was reluctant about that. "If I let you sleep in my bed tonight you two are going to be banging your heads against the wall every night to get to sleep in here!". They promised, in all seriousness that they wouldn't.

So they settled in for the night. And yes, I Googled "tooth through lip" to ease my mind. Reese was still crying about it long after Drue had stopped. She said, "Whenever I see blood I cover that part on me because I think I am going to bleed."