May Again or Still…….

So it is not quite June so that makes two blogs this month. But we had a Memorial Weekend Picnic. It really wasn’t our picnic – it was the DeM’s picnic from T’s Mother’s Circle. A nice group of people came and enjoyed the hot dogs and sausages roasted over the fire along with S’mores for dessert. And plenty of “dishes to pass.” D drove the usual garden tractor hay rides with two wagons and plenty of excited kids. It’s nice he can drive the tractor again – makes him feel useful. Kids played in the tree house and no one fell out although there was one child who insisted she needed a “bigger kid” to help get her out cuz she was too scared! Not any of our home kids. That was a friend kid.

Simboy managed to get whacked in the head because they “were playing dangerously with big sticks” according to the Agirl who accidentally inflicted the damage while trying to protect another girl. In spite of being carried out of the woods by three large adult males franctically pressing a cloth to his forehead (in the wrong place it turned out!), the damage was only worth a large bandage and no stitches. I didn’t have to call up my nursing skills since one of the men had grown up in a doctor’s house and was quite adequate to the job. We had all the equipment needed leftover from D’s foot surgery. Sterile water, large bandages, gauze, meds. We are Very Prepared here. And the best news was that we didn’t need to call the ER Dr. back to our house again since he’d left just a few hours earlier.

Did you know we have a house call doctor out here? He came out once to sew up R’s hand about a year ago when R tried sawing it off. This time T was carefully cutting the heel of a loaf of delicious homemade sour dough rye bread for the kids’ lunch and sliced into the heel of her own thumb! Agirl brought me the news that Mom Needs You – she cut herself! So, by the time I wended my way down the stairs and across the road,  T had her hand in the sink with a cloth pressing it together. She took it off so I could see it and I got a long clean rag to wrap it back up immediately since there was more blood than what I figured a butterfly bandage would hold. She rested on the floor for awhile until her head stopped spinning and then hunted up the dr.’s number. He would be back in the Valley about 3 and it could wait that long, no problem. We eventually took off the rag, just to make sure we weren’t calling him out for nothing and saw that there was  a largish  flap of skin and muscle no longer attached to the rest of her thumb heel. We put it back with a large non-adhesive pad from D’s supplies and wrapped it all up with gauze. It looked much more presentable than the rag bandage.

Meanwhile, people are showing up for the picnic so I cleaned up my kitchen for the surgery and about 4 the Doc came by and took off my lovely bandages to have a look. The wound had stopped bleeding quite so profusely so it didn’t look quite as bad but the doc managed to put 6 stitches in (with novocaine) and wrapped it all up nicely again. His bandage looked nicer than mine ONLY because he had some hot pink sticky tape that he wrapped around it. So, now, the doc says Don’t Bump Your Hand for 4-5 days. He said this to a mom of six including 1 yr old twins. And don’t get it wet for a while either. Stitches in for 10 days. Call if there are any problems.

So that’s how we began our Memorial Weekend Festivities. I left out about R being sick and all the kids having summer colds and Gtwin still having problems with her legs and fun stuff like that. Hope you all are having nice weather for picnics, too.