A trip to the emergency room

Based on the title, I'm sure you'd like to get to the meat of the story, but I'll set it up for you anyway. Today started like most Saturdays, STRUGGLING to make it to gymnastics on time. Fortunately, there were all kinds of parking spaces this morning. What gives? Braden was running practice across the hall from the gymnastics room, so I gave him Ethan in the backpack to carry around while Blythe went to gymnastics. Although she did get a bit of whiplash jumping off of the balance beam, that is not where the emergency occurred.

We headed home and hung out for a few minutes before getting back in the car to head to an Easter egg hunt. This one church in Blacksburg puts on a free egg hunt each year and they also have moon bouncers, free cotton candy, popcorn, and prizes. I'd like to say it was practice for the Easter egg hunt we're headed to next weekend in Dallas (can't wait!), but this egg hunt has SO MANY eggs that there really is no hunting. There are tons just everywhere and the kids go in, pick them all up, then they come out with even more "replacements". They literally just turned a giant box over and dumped them out. Once those were gone, they tried distributing another box, but the kids just followed them around taking them directly out of the box. They're all filled with candy too, so we have quite a bit of candy too. Although the kids struggled to stay standing in the hurricane force winds we were having, this was not where the emergency happened. Here are some pics from the Easter egg hunt:

After all the eggs were found, we headed out. Blythe tried to get us to let her jump in the moonbouncers, but Braden wanted to stop by the International Festival on campus since one of his swimmers was working a tent and he said we'd drop by.

After searching for a parking space for a while, we finally found one. Blythe asked to get on my shoulders while Braden got Ethan in his backpack. He needed a little help situating Ethan onto his back, so I tried to help with one hand while holding Blythe on with the other, but she wiggled free of my grip and fell backwards off of my shoulders, head first onto the asphalt below. Immediately she started screaming and I immediately picked her up. I looked briefly for scrapes, but didn't see any. Then Braden said I had blood all over my cheek, so she must have been bleeding from somewhere. I checked and she was bleeding from a small, but deep wound on the back of her head. So we quickly got back in the car and headed for the emergency room. Me in the back putting pressure on the wound and Blythe continuing to scream the whole way there.

She continued to scream in the waiting room. The few minutes we had to wait seemed like forever. Though this one guy did come in after us looking REALLY rough, like he might vomit all over the place and fortunately they took him back first. So we got called back, they examined her and said she'd need one staple. The cut was clean, nothing inside, and the radiation from a CAT scan would be more detrimental than it was worth (and since she never blacked out, they didn't feel it necessary). Since it was only one staple, it would have been just as bad to get a numbing shot and then the staple than to just get the staple. So, one staple in the head with no numbing. We had a lot of screaming.

Here's a picture of the head wound. She wouldn't hold still for my picture, so you can just maybe barely see the staple there.

She did calm down and after a lot of waiting on paperwork, we were able to leave. As we were leaving the hospital, she asks Braden, "can I get on your shoulders?". So at least she's not scarred for life (mentally that is).

If only we had just let her jump on those damn moonbouncers.