Oh Ainsley!

I often used to tell people that even though my kids were crazy, rough and tumble, we'd never yet had a visit to the Emergency Center and that meant something. Well, I can now no longer say that . . . for as I always knew would be the case, Ainsley broke our streak.

On Wednesday night Ainsley and Jake were upstairs watching a movie while we were downstairs beginning our study with our Community Group. Every now and then we'd hear some playing or rough-housing but in general things were good. Then all of the sudden I hear a big crash and Ainsley start to wail. Well, Ainsley wailing is nothin' new to be honest with ya but I thought it was time for them to hit the sack anyway so I came up to check and then put them in bed. As I'm walking up the stairs I can hear Jake apologizing profusely and by the time I arrived Ainsley was sucking her thumb and no longer crying - she gotten engrossed in the movie again already. But as I walked up I see blood running down her face from a pretty big gash in her forehead. I picked her up and ran downstairs to Ryan where we applied some pressure until the bleeding slowed and then took a group consensus and decided she needed to be seen. So off Ainsley and I head to the urgent care centered followed by our good friend and pastor Richard (Ryan was going to stay home with Jake and Reid in case we were there a long time). When we got there the wait wasn't too bad and Ainsley was really in pretty good spirits but when we peeled off the bandage I'd stuck on we could see that this was truly a deep and pretty significant cut. The doctor concurred and told us it would need stitches (crap!!! I'd really been hoping they could just glue it) and they produced the papoose - which is the closest thing we have to a torture device in modern day society. If you know my Ainsley at all you know she did not like the papoose one bit even though we made sure to strap lovie into her little hand. The stitch procedure was long and horrific and I won't go into the details other than that it made more than one person in that room queasy and light headed. In the end it took one deep stitch and 5 on top to cover it all over. We rewarded her at the end with Dora stickers and a lollipop which Ainsley felt were a mere pittance for what she'd been through but accepted them anyway. I asked the staff if she was the loudest patient of the day and the just laughed. And then said, "oh yeah". Hmm, maybe she was the loudest patient so far this year. Its hard to imagine a more powerful set of lungs than Ainsley's and she screamed from start to finish with brief breaks when I could think of a song to sing. But as soon as I'd take a breath she'd scream again which was totally distracting to my train of thought.

The next morning when I had to change her bandage Jake took one look and took off for downstairs crying. Maybe the guilt was setting in? Turns out that as best we can tell they were running around and Jake pushed Ainsley and she fell and hit her head on the corner of the TV stand. At least that is the current story and, so far, Jake is stickin' to it.

Looks like the little princess is going to be ok although I might be tempted to finally cut some bangs on her while the scar heals. Meanwhile she can tell people she is related to Harry Potter.