Super Humans

I'm beginning to think that my children share a super power: incredibly high tolerances for pain. In the past 3 weeks, we've had an incident with each child that, in most cases, would land the average kid in the emergency room. So far, we've dodged that bullet.

First up was Jack. We were in New Braunfels, staying in a large vacation rental with a house full of family and friends. There was a leather futon in the game room that the kids turned into a slide. Apparently, (we weren't there to witness it) Jack took a minor spill on the Futon Slide. He got pretty cranky and pouty afterwards, which we attributed to the fact that it was naptime. We put him down for a nap and he slept (albeit fitfully--waking a few times, whimpering, but easily soothed back to sleep) for an un-Godly number of hours. When he woke up from his marathon nap, he was still fussy and clingy. We attributed it to teething, being out of sorts and having an upset routine, the impending stomach bug that was bound to befall us, (as everyone else in the house had been suffering through it) etc.

After awhile, we noticed that Jack was favoring his left arm. He's left handed and we noticed that he was going out of his way to use only his right hand and was holding his left wrist. Fortunately, one of the people staying with us in the house was Corey, Kevin's cousin who is a paramedic/firefighter. We enlisted Corey's help to see if he could determine what was wrong with our Jack and his left arm. After Corey poked around on Jack's arm a little, he felt a pop in Jack's wrist and, all of the sudden, Jack went from fussy, sad boy to his normal, happy self. Turns out, we think that Jack dislocated his wrist during his fall from the Futon Slide in the gameroom. I've been counting our lucky stars that Corey was there and was able to determine what was really wrong and fix it on the spot. I really believe that, otherwise, we would've spent the whole time blaming the usual suspects (teething, tummy issues, etc) and pumping our poor child full of Tylenol, Anbesol and the like.

Now onto our Super Hero, Anna. A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the night, Anna came into our room and told me that her ear hurt. Our girl is on a constant quest to obtain Tylenol, like some kind of prescription drug-addicted, emergency room regular. She really just likes the hummingbird food-flavor of the stuff, but she's always coming up with new reasons why she needs a dose of Tylenol (such as: a twitchy eyelid, a scrape to the knee, a bitten tongue, etc). So, when she came into our room in the middle of the night, complaining of ear pain, I pretty much suspected that she was up to her usual tricks but got up and gave her a dose of Tylenol, sent her back to bed and made a note to myself to check her out in the morning. We all awoke the next morning and business was as usual. I vaguely remembered our middle of the night discussion of ear pain and, since she was feeling like her usual self, I dismissed it all. Fast forward to her 4 year check up this past week, I told the pediatrician to check out her ears extra well, just to be safe. Well, it seems as though our poor girl had suffered a ruptured ear drum (which likely happened the night that she came into our room). There's typically copious amounts of goo and ooze associated with a ruptured ear drum, which Anna somehow managed to avoid...further masking her ailment. There's no permanent damage to her ear and she's on some antibiotics to clear up any remaining ick that's still in her ear.

You can call these instances parental neglect on our part or super-human pain tolerance on our children's part. I just call us lucky.