Trauma

Sam was at home with me all day Friday. His school was closed for parent-teacher conferences. We met with Sam's teacher in the morning and she had lots of good things to say. The summary is that he prefers math to reading and needs to work on holding a pencil. She said if she gives him a choice he will always choose the math activities, but he has trouble transferring that work to paper. The main issue is that we can't really tell which is his dominant hand. It still appears to be his left hand, but he's still switching back and forth. The picture above is from his build-a-book kit that he picked out at the book fair at his school.

I printed out some worksheets and worked with him yesterday and today, and I think he does a better job with his left hand. He refused to try to use the scissors with his left hand though.

So here's the trauma ... Sam and I made a batch of peanut butter cookies. Sam did almost everything himself: measured, stirred, scooped out the cookies, put them on the tray, did the criss-cross with the fork, used the spatula to take them off the tray and put them on the cooling racks, and then put them in the cookie jar. He was very proud of himself. Chris walked in the door just as we were putting the second batch in the cookie jar. Sam gave him a cookie and Chris raved about how good it was, so Sam was doing a little happy dance on his stool, put his hand on the cooling tray, and it slid off the counter and Sam fell over backwards from his stool.

I picked him up right away and Chris went to get the ice pack. When I pulled my hand away from his head it was covered in blood. Sam was crying "Mommy, Mommy" over and over. I was completely freaked out at that point. Chris got a flashlight to check for concussion and determined that he was okay. I insisted that we take him to one of the Acute Kids Urgent Care locations. It was hard to keep him awake on the way there even though it was just ten minutes away. He perked right up when we got to the doctor's office though. They had lots of new toys to play with.

The doctors and nurses were amazing. Sam was so brave and never complained. After they cleaned his wounds they decided the scratch on his chin would be glued and held together with a Steri-Strip, but he was going to need two staples on the back of his head. They numbed his head with lidocaine ointment before they put the staples in. The funny thing was that he didn't want a band-aid. Sam loves band-aids, but he didn't want one when he actually needed one. He ran around the rest of the night acting like nothing was wrong, but he had a little freak-out when he saw his chin in the mirror that night. His head was still bleeding when he went to bed so Chris put a bandage on his hair. We woke him up twice during the night to check for any signs of concussion.

We had to skip soccer today, but it was hard to keep him from just running around the house. The doctor just stressed that we wanted to prevent him from reinjuring his chin since that would prevent it from healing well with minimal scarring. We have to go back in 7 to 10 days to have the staples removed.

Here are some random pictures and videos from the last few weeks ...

Sam is going to be Spiderman for Halloween. Of course he had to try the costume on as soon as we got it. He was running all over the house, so this was the only picture that wasn't a total blur.

Multi-tasking, a common site around our house - working on the computer and watching TV.

Here's a video of Sam dancing to the music from a baby toy.

Here's a video of Sam playing a computer game.