A Boo Boo for My Baby

So I was all set to spend the post-Jack's bedtime, pre-my bedtime period tonight writing a great blog entry about all the great things Jack has been up to.  His constant walking everywhere (now only using a hand to edge along the wall, not even needing furniture.  His expanding dietary experiments--Saturday we had blueberry banana pancakes and eggs as a whole family (!), Jack now eats, among other things, hummus, cottage cheese, and dried figs, and he can now feed himself bananas, mini bagels, and pears.

And his adorable new incarnations of the desire to take things out of containers.  

Yesterday he emptied every one of Ben's pairs of athletics socks 

from their basket on the floor of Ben's closet.  Today when we got our grocery order, Jack unloaded his own groceries!  He found the Ella's Kitchen packets (my one foray into premade

 baby food) in the sacks on the kitchen floor and proceeded to take them all out of the sack and line them up neatly!  Then he tried very, very hard to open the screw tops.  That's when I knew it was time for lunch.

Or all the fun play dates we've been having--lunch with Karem and Keira on Monday, going to the indoor playground at the National Army Museum (I know it sounds weird, but they have a totally gun-free soft play area for babies there, oddly enough) with our Abi and Leila playgroup on Tuesday.

But those blogging plans changed about 5:30 tonight when Jack split open the big toe on his right foot.  He's fine, just to let you know, lest I give all of you who haven't heard the story a heart attack.  I was making his dinner and Jack was playing in the kitchen on the floor beside me.  He really likes to stand up and play with things on the bottom two pantry shelves (the ones he can reach), so I try to keep lots of baby-friendly items there--lots of lids, a bag of marshmallows, some pop cans for him to roll around, a wooden spoon and light mixing bowls, etc.  But I hadn't noticed that there were also a few cans of soup on the second shelf.  While he was playing, one of the cans came crashing down on Jack's toe and really banged it up.  At the risk of being too graphic, it created a cut that went through his toenail and over the tip of his toe.  Not a wide cut, but probably about 1/2 an inch long, which looks massive on his tiny little foot!  

There was blood (probably not a lot, but it felt like it), and Jack was screaming, and I was terrified.  I called Ben, who couldn't hear anything except Jack wailing and me saying "Come home now!"  Then called 999 (the UK's 911).  The ambulance came right away (at home I wouldn't have even called one since I would have a car to take him to the ER myself, since it wasn't anywhere near life-threatening), but Stacy and Kaia fortuitously arrived before them, which really saved my sanity.  Jack has stopped crying and was just looking slightly sad after about 5 minutes, long before Stacy even arrived.  The medic was the largest man I think I've ever seen in my life, which was a bit surreal, but he was very gentle and said it wasn't anything to be that concerned about but that they could take us to the hospital if we wanted.  By then Ben had arrived home and we decided to go to the hospital just to have it looked at.  

By the time we got to the hospital, Jack was smiling and laughing and eating Cheerios.  While the doctor examined him, Jack was standing up, even putting weight on his injured foot.  No stitches necessary, just a little bit of tape and a bandage three times the size of his toe.  When we got home, he went straight to bed.  Throughout the entire ordeal he didn't even have any Tylenol!  What an amazingly resilient little boy we have.  I just wish my mommy guilt for letting him get hurt was as easily put aside...