Undertow

Orange Beach, Alabama

Thanksgiving 2012

     We spent Thanksgiving at the beach with Vic and Stacey and the nephews and niece.  It was a wonderful trip.  We stayed up too late, slept even later, napped whenever we wanted, ate well, drank some, and insisted that the children do absolutely positively nothing educational or productive over their Thanksgiving holiday. We did provide them with shovels and buckets so they spent most of their time on the beach digging trenches. On Saturday afternoon, we herded all the children down to the water at sunset in an attempt to take some photos of the five of them together, but our success was limited by the fact that poor Nephew Cooper was feeling decidedly under the weather so his stay on the beach was brief.  The photo above is the last shot I took of Owen and Sarah that evening.  The sun was disappearing fast at this point and they were both complaining that they were freezing (big babies - it was in the high 50s and only a little breezy) but they were laughing and having a great time. And then Sunday morning we woke up very early and drove back to Nashville and I kid you not, the whole way home I had this sense of dread that we were going back to "something."  I halfway expected us to be involved in an accident on the interstate or have a flat tire or some other malady on the drive home and Joel can attest to the fact that I was a lovely traveling companion for him that day. We made it home safe and sound and by late Sunday afternoon we were doing laundry and ordering dinner and getting ourselves organized for the week ahead.


Bright and way too early on Monday morning we all returned to work and school and then at 4pm my phone rang.  It was a call from school telling me that Sarah had fallen on the playground and they were requesting that we get there quickly.  We picked her up and took her to the ER hoping but not really expecting that she was more fine than not.  "Hoping" because as long as Joel was carrying her she said she was fine and that nothing hurt.  "Not really expecting" because she refused to put her foot on the ground and wouldn't/couldn't stand on the scale for the triage nurse to weigh her so she ended up sitting on the baby scale to be weighed.  We went back to "hoping" when she refused to take anything for pain because she said nothing was hurting really - she just didn't want to walk. The mind games we parents play when we want our kids to be fine and not injured.  After what seemed like forever, we were ushered to a "hallway room" where a very nice and very young doctor showed us the x-ray of Sarah's broken tibia, told us she'd be spending all of her upcoming free time in a cast that would stretch from her toes to way above her knee, then turned us over to two delightfully unconcerned orthopedic interns and one very wonderful nurse. The poor interns lost points in my book because they knew she hadn't had any pain medication but they started manipulating her foot and leg anyway and there was a moment there where I thought Sarah was going to pass out from the pain plus they had two packages of white fiberglass tape and two packages of black fiberglass tape and didn't think it was going to be a big deal if they mixed the two on her very long cast. And when I say "mixed" I don't mean in a fun stripey kind of way, but in a half and half kind of way. Um, no.  Bless the sweet nurse's heart who both listened to me and saw that Sarah was in a great deal of pain and had them stop casting her leg for a few minutes so that Sarah could take some very powerful medication and then made the effort to find two more packages of white fiberglass tape because she understood that no eight year old girl would want to be seen wearing a mismatched black and white cast.  And then we carried Sarah out of there and headed home.  The two biggest concerns I had leaving the ER that night were 1) will SG and her cast fit into the backseat of the car  (it was the first time I really missed the big blue minivan) and 2) how were we ever going to keep that white cast clean?  The answers turned out to be 1) she will fit in the backseat if you remove her car seat and have her sit sideways and 2)you can't keep a white cast clean.  You can, however, have it covered with a festive green layer and then have everybody in the universe sign it. And that was December and January. It was a long winter season at our house.

Big Green Cast

Hallway Room No. 3