Poor Little Thomas

We had quite a busy day today. Maria came running to John and me telling us that Thomas had fallen down and was bleeding. I ran to where he was, and sure enough, he was bleeding. A lot. In fact, blood was pouring out of his mouth. After rinsing his mouth with water, we finally determined that his teeth were all in place, but he had a huge gash in his tongue. And when the bleeding stopped (which didn't take very long, thankfully), we realized that the huge gash was... really huge. And really deep. He had apparently hit his chin when he fell, and so bit down on his tongue hard. It's painful for me even to think about.

Of course these things always happen on weekends. Or at night. Whenever the doctor's office is closed. It looked so horrible, I really wanted a doctor to see it, but I couldn't imagine what they could do for him. So we drove him to the ER, where sure enough they told us there was not really anything they could do (after making sure he had had his tetanus shot), and gave us a long list of things to do to care for it, and what he could, and could not eat. Mostly what he could not eat. He may have a diet of ice cream and mashed potatoes for awhile. Not that the poor kid is really willing to eat much of anything. We try to coax small bites, but it's so sore he won't take it. And he's just sort of been whimpering for the past few hours. It breaks my heart. Although he gets a kick out of the reaction he gets whenever he sticks out his tongue. And he has a really funny lisp.

I'm sure he'll be fine, but we seem to have had a string of injuries in the past 6 months with this kid. I don't imagine this will be our last trip to the ER. Sigh. Sweet Maria never did anything like this. Although she did set off the house alarm for our building yesterday (which sounds just like a fire alarm, but doesn't alert the fire dept, just everyone in the whole building that someone may be in trouble, which in fact was true, after all was said and done), but I think she, unlike Thomas, will learn from that mistake. When I asked her why she had done it, she said, "I didn't know what would happen." Which is a great reason to press random buttons. The noise was so loud that she wanted to know "why does it hurt inside my head?"

We took pictures for posterity, but they're pretty gruesome, so I think I won't post them. I wonder how long it is before he's climbing on the head of his rocking horse to get something off a shelf he can't reach. He waited all of 5 minutes after smashing the gate down and falling down the stairs to go back to the stairs and try it again.