Tuesday 10th March
2) I hate wrists, I can't touch them or look at them.
Weird, I know, but this has been the way since I was about twelve. I am super-squeamish and hate the sight of blood and anything gaping open where it shouldn't be gaping open, and wrists are just horrible veiny reminders of all that blood pumping round your body and fragile damagable skin....gah. I'm shuddering and tasting blood even as I think about it. I'm definately not one for gore - I hide behind my hands when I watch action movies until the fight scenes are over.
So I am very very grateful that so far none of my children have ever presented me with a real blood-filled emergency.
I know you're all screaming now - 'What are you doing writing this on your blog? Stop tempting fate, woman!' Well, I don't believe in fate, so there. But I do believe in being thankful and I am. The worst I have encountered is when Turtle was about a year old and stood himself in a large toy bin in the back room of church, then knocked it over with himself still inside and whacked the back of his head on a huge sharp hinge on the door. The cut was small but fairly deep and had managed to slice through a small chunk of his hair so that I had to actually pull the severed hair back out of the cut. But it stopped bleeding after a few minutes and wasn't even worth a trip to the hospital. That's it - that's the worst.
I'm not saying that we don't regularly have injuries of course. Not a week goes by without a head bump, a nosebleed (I don't mind those because you can't see the source of the blood), a split lip or a black eye (for the best example of this, see 'Scooby Doozy', August 08). And we've had a few trips to the A&E too, but they never coincided with the bloody bits, as they were mainly related to asthma attacks, more head bumps, and a phase that Crash went through of 'pulled-elbow syndrome'. It's a real thing where a child's elbow can have a weakness and sometimes kind of dislocates itself out of place. This tends to happen more when the child is being rather uncooperative and is being firmly walked with a vice-like hand grip to or from nursery whilst having a tantrum, or holding onto railings and being pulled off pursuaded to let go. Thankfully the doctors every time were very understanding and appeased our guilt each time, and from then on we remembered to pursuade him using his left arm instead.
My grandma had five boys and one girl, lived on a farm and has many more horror stories to tell, varying from broken limbs from climbing trees, to broken noses in a bus crash, to nearly losing a two-year old in a slurry pit. Top of the list was when her youngest came to her aged seventeen, holding his fingers which he had nearly sliced off with a circular saw, and she had to go back to the workshop to find his thumb.
I'm going off to throw up now.
