This weekend was our first trip to the ER. Our son tripped over a pile of unfolded clothes on the floor and hit his forehead on the bookshelf. There are few sights scarier than looking at your child with his face covered in blood. Needless to say the cut was fairly small, but just bad enough to require stitches.
There is one important thing to keep in mind, as a parent, when your child gets hurt, and that is to remain as calm as possible. Children react to your emotions, so freaking out will only make them freak out more. When he got hurt my son was pretty hysterical, which isn’t that uncommon for a three year old. But I was able to sit him on my lap with a washcloth over his injury while his father called to find out where to take him. As long as we were calm (singing songs and telling stories) he relaxed enough so that he wasn’t crying and we could get a pretty good look at the cut.
This being our first real injury, and on a Sunday, we weren’t exactly sure where to take him. It didn’t seem bad enough to necessitate the ER. So we first tried an Urgent Care center. I have to admit I learned my own lesson about staying calm while at the Urgent Care. These people seemed to have no idea how to handle an injured three year old. They thought they could just talk him into sitting still while they numbed his head and then sewed it up. They obviously had never met my son who hates even having lotion put on him. It was a complete disaster watching them try to hold him down (which is when I lost it) and eventually we ended up at the Pediatric ER where they handled it quickly and efficiently, although I’ll probably never forget the sight of his pleading eyes while the doctor put a needle through his skin.
I’m obviously hoping we don’t have to go through that again, but if we do I’m sure the ER will be our first stop, no matter how bad it seems. He is fine now and will have a pretty cool scar to show off for the rest of his life, but I for one still get a bit shaky when I think about how fragile these little bodies are.
In a communications class I am currently taking we are focusing on what it means to exist in the ‘everyday’. One of the profound realizations we have come to in our discussions is that our everyday lives are ordinary, yet the mundaneness of the everyday is necessary and relevant for analyzing. This may seem like an odd statement, but when placed alongside the life of a mother I think it is even more illuminating.
Often as a parent I struggle to embrace the ordinary-ness of everyday life. Staying at home and doing ‘nothing’ with the kids seems like a waste of a day and detrimental to the always absorbing mind of these impressionable children. Yet I see that this everyday life we lead with our children is essential for them to learn how to recognize the extraordinary events of our lives as well as to live with an appreciation for the ordinary adventures of the day to day.
Our children grow up very quickly, there is little denying that. It is difficult, however, to see much changes from day to day, and without witnessing the changes we can be tempted into thinking that the individual days don’t matter. But I want to stress that everyday can an adventure, no matter how ordinary it is, because children learn and grow from every experience, not just the extraordinary ones.
I always struggle with creative crafts to do with the kids. If there is a creative bone in my body it is probably one of those tiny little inner ear bones, but even that is probably too big to hold all my creative genius. But there are so many days when I strive to do just one creative thing. Most days this urge is driven by the kids. We have managed to amass an enormous collection of craft materials that day after day sits in the cute plastic storage bin I purchased on one of my organizing kicks. But when I sit and look at the mix I am dumbfounded as to what type of crafty projects to do.
So I let my kid cut up paper. My son loves using his kid scissors, and even if he has a pattern to cut out the paper inevitably ends up as confetti all over the kitchen table, the family room floor and often into his sister’s mouth. So today I relented and just let him cut paper up into his classic tiny squares.
But even though today I was ok with letting my son create his own art, I still had the urge to create something myself. I have a project in the basement painting shapes on our walls with chalkboard paint. That project is only half done, but is usually too risky to attempt with the kids running amok. So today I did what any creatively starved person would do, I painted the moulding. I find I need something, anything that I can look at as a completed task; an accomplishment. Parenting is an incredibly rewarding experience, but the day to day accomplishments are hard to notice. So even though its just a little white paint on the walls of our basement, I at least have something quantifiable to show for today.
