... but everything's fine today.

We had our first emergency room visit yesterday.

We were supposed to have a playdate at the park, but as we were getting ready to go the other mom called and canceled. Her daughter was throwing up. So, off we went on our own to spend a couple of hours having a great deal of fun. The weather was perfect, cool without being cold. There were kids to play with, but not so many families there that all the equipment was overcrowded and the other kids were friendly and fun to play with.

It was a great day, until we were leaving. There's a stream that runs along one side of the parking lot and yesterday there were some ducks there. We stopped to watch the ducks along with another mom and her two sons. The kids started exploring along the water, the mom and I started talking and before I knew it, time was slipping away and so were the kids. The four of them had made their way almost to the street, so the other mom and I called them back.

They headed back without protest (always a nice thing) and I turned my attention back to my conversation with my (hopefully) new friend, who seemed very nice. I was still keeping an eye on the kids, though, which is how I saw the toddler step down from the edge of the blacktop to the rocky bank of the creek. Sadly, she's still not very good at all about stepping down without hanging on to something. In fact, she's never taken a step down without holding on to something. Sure enough, she took a nose dive, or rather a swan dive, right onto her head.

When she got up, sobbing, I was already there, holding her in my arms and trying to soothe her. There was a big fat trickle of blood running down the side of her face, though, and when I managed to get enough blood cleared away from her cut to examine it I could see it was narrow, but deep.

The other mom offered the comment that it looked like a cut her son had a few weeks before, which she'd taken him to the emergency room for, where they'd glued it. That sounded like a good idea to me, so off we went.

(I did call our doctor and they confirmed they didn't want us in there. Since it was her head they wanted the hospital to take care of it.)

In the end, all went well, although it took a while. A hospital worker gave both the girls little teddy bears made by a local church, and lollipops, too. We wound up missing naptime and lunch, though, so with the sugar the girls wound up first bouncing off the walls (while we were waiting in the exam room for the doctor) and then melting down into hysteria soon after we got home.

The doctor glued the cut, which turned out to be only one centimeter wide. No-one bothered to measure how deep it was. The toddler obviously wasn't concussed the way she was tearing around and fighting with her sister when the doctor came in, so they sent us off with just some instructions not to wash her hair until tomorrow (today now) and to bring her back if she started acting oddly or started throwing up.

It was no big deal, but the husband kept saying last night how impressed he was that I didn't panic. I was never anywhere near close to panic. (If I didn't know that head cuts always bleed like crazy I might have been a lot more scared, though! Wow, that was a lot of blood to see coming out of my sweet baby's head.) I was lot closer to wringing both their necks for screaming at each other as they fought over the wheeled stool that was in our area.

It's always nice to impress my sweetie, though.

Interesting side note: As we were leaving the hospital we saw today's playdate coming in. Their oldest boy was showing signs of appendicitis. I called last night to see how he was and learned it was "just" strep throat. So much for today's playdate.

As I pointed out to the husband, two days, two playdates, two sick kids. Sheesh, it's enough to make me start thinking of myself as a bad luck playdate!

Just call me Typhoid Mommy.