The fall guy
The G-man has a HUGE goose-egg. Gigantic. It has its own climate and zip code. Plus, there's a cut down the middle that's bleeding a bit.
To make matters worse, we didn't know it was there. He fell earlier in the evening out of sight of both of us. That's right, there are moments when NO ONE IS LOOKING DIRECTLY AT HIM! I know this is shocking to you, and to him as well, I think. So I'm not mother of the year. But even if a set of eyes had been on him, chances are, I couldn't have prevented the fall. For example, last week, Scott and I were standing inches away from him on either side as he climbed on some equipment at Gymboree. He attempted to go head-first down a climbing incline and neither one of us could stop him in time before a new bruise popped up. It happens.
But back to this latest head trauma...
Believe me when I say I did rush to his side as soon as I heard the bump and the wail. He had his hand near his mouth so I feared a mouth injury. (Last week his best friend put a tooth through his lip on a fall. Yikes.) I held my little guy tight until the minute or so of crying settled down. I checked his mouth for blood, saw none, gave him super-duper kisses and set him down on his way when he was ready.
For the next 20 minutes or so, G-man ran around the house, pushed toys, drank some soymilk and brushed his teeth. All happily.
Imagine my surprise when bath time came next and Scott yelled out, "Have you seen this huge bump?!" We were both amazed to see this new natural wonder rising on his forehead. And why didn't we see it sooner, you might ask? Um, it was under his hair. The kid's got a lot. And it's kind of long. More on that in another post.
This led to a call to the doctor's office - love the late hours - to see what we should look for concussion-wise and if it was still ok to put him to bed on time. As long as he wasn't throwing up, walking ok and generally appeared fine, he probably was. We had to wake him up an hour after he fell asleep to make sure he could wake up and check during the night for responsiveness and vomit. Good thing I've had insomnia recently.
The other advice? Put an ice pack on it. Yeah, right. The nurse did say it would be hard and wished me luck. Very helpful. Have you tried to put an ice pack on a kid's head? Freakin' impossible here. To begin with, the ones in our house are the size of his head. It's like using a 10 lb. bag of ice to cool your tea. And you can't actually keep it on with those little hands swatting at you and the head whipping around like his neck is a noodle.
So I've decided to invent some sort of ice pack band-aid, something you can strap on to a kid that will be cool enough to do the job, but not give him brain freeze. And it will be the size of most toddler boo-boos. Any investors?
