Scary moment

We decided to make the most of the sunshine today and took the kids to the Common. We were playing on and around the fallen trees, when an old school friend & his wife showed up. We were standing chatting when Nathan suddenly started screaming. I turned around to see him fallen over, and blood pouring off his face - far more blood than I've seen in a while. In that instant, my heart stopped. There's nothing like seeing your child injured like that.

But then, reason reasserted itself. If he's screaming, he's going to be fine. It's the silent ones that are seriously injured. Also, the face/head area always bleeds far more than the injury seems to warrant, so however much blood there appeared to be, the injury probably wouldn't be that serious.

Running over, I realised that he'd tripped and fallen, but because he was holding a stick in his hand, he had gouged himself with the stick. Thank God, it didn't go into his eye! (Could you imagine if that happened?) At first, I couldn't see what the damage was, because there was so much blood and I didn't have anything to staunch the flow with. Fortunately though, the friend's wife is a doctor. She took a quick look, and assured us that it wasn't too serious.

We headed back to the car and cleaned him up a bit, to discover that he has a rather large chunk missing from his lip. I'm sure will leave a permanent scar. Poor baby - he's going to struggle to eat and drink for a while, but he'll live.

The mother breathes a sigh of relief. The child takes a massive dose of painkillers with his bottle. Here's hoping we BOTH sleep better tonight.