So, I know I have tons to catch up on, but I just can't resist skipping ahead and posting about Ryker's injury today. The pictures are NOT for the faint of heart so I'll put them at the end so you can read the story without looking if you want to.
The Andrews (Brice's sister's family) are out visiting and the kids have been having a blast! They were all out in the front yard waiting for us to get out the door to go to Brice's brother's house for dinner. Ryker and some of his cousins were playing tag and Ryker was on the trailer in the front yard. He fell off and caught his leg on an L-shaped brace which just ripped right into his leg. Ouch! He screamed, which he does almost every time he gets even semi hurt. I kinda could tell by how he fell that he'd been jabbed pretty good by something, but being the awesome mom that I am, what do I do? I tell him not to scream. Uncle Wes was closer to him than I was, so he went over and scooped him up and carried him towards me. He asked, "Where do you want me to put him?" I said, "Uh, in the car. We're going to need some stitches." Wes turned him a little in his arms to see the wound and said, "Yep, I think you're right!" (Here, I would normally insert a picture of the wound, but for those of you who are squeamish, you're welcome, and I will save it for later so you don't have to see.) He put him on the porch while I ran through the house collecting shoes for my other kids and Brice, calling for Brice to hurry his buns up getting ready (he'd been in the shower) cuz we needed to go NOW, finding the insurance cards, and getting a towel to put over Ryker's gash. It wasn't bleeding much, fortunately. The cut kinda went in under the skin and a long way up through the fatty tissue, but not deep enough to get to the muscle, which is a lot more vascular and would have meant LOTS of blood. Wes, who is typically pretty squeamish, really stepped up and kept Ryker looking into his face and calm so that he wasn't looking into his cut and freaking out (when Ryker first got a good look at his cut when he was in Wes's arms, he said, "I can see my BONE!!" We quickly straightened out that misconception! He thought that the fatty tissue, being whitish yellow instead of blood-red, was his bone. He'd never seen fatty tissue before). We got Ryker loaded up in one car, the other kids loaded in the other, and we went to the Insta-Care while Wes drove the rest of our kids over to Brice's brother's house for dinner. Brice's sister drove her brood in their car. We were at the Insta-Care for about an hour or so. The doctor was great. He was so good with Ryker and thought Ryker was hilarious. He is. He was saying funny stuff and being his normal Ryker-y self. All happy and chipper. He didn't like the shot part, but otherwise, he said it was easy. He even seemed to feel a little bit of pain after the shot but decided he'd rather suffer through it than get more Lidocaine. While waiting for the doc, he decided to practice perfecting snapping his fingers (don't worry--not a scary pic):
And he would not stop moving around! Crazy kid! Brice and I talked to him and told him all the things that would happen and then the doc told him everything, step by step, before he did them as well. He also talked me through the stitching, teaching me names of techniques and explaining it to me because I guess he could see that I was interested. Brice, on the other hand, had to go take a couple of time-outs. He got queasy a couple of times and had to go sit in the chair behind the bed until the color came back into his face (it was mostly his lips that were really pale when I looked at him). Even Ryker was watching everything that was happening. A couple of times, the doctor or nurse's hands were in his way so he couldn't see and he fussed at them about it because he really wanted to watch everything that happened to him. He's such a Somers. Brice's dad will be so proud!
Ready for pictures? Stop here if you don't want to see them!!!!
Here's the wound at the hospital before they did anything other than put a topical numbing agent on it:
And here's the wound all stitched up with 18 stitches:
And now it's all cleaned up and ready to be bandaged:
Oh the adventures we have with Ryker in our family!!
