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Saturday, May 14, 2011

Birthday Parties and Emergency Visits


We went to Abby's friend Greg's 9th birthday party today. It was a lovely homegrown affair - movies on Netflix with popcorn, pizza, decorating cupcakes, passing around the Giant Bow to try on, and playground play. Everything went really well and the kids were getting along great (our three, Birthday Boy Greg, and Greg's friend Sam, who kept us in stitches by asking questions like, "Who wants to volunteer for my shrinky-freezy ray experiment?" He's a hoot.). Given the disparate age range (two nine-year-old boys and girls of nearly 11, eight, and three-and-a-half), everything went very very well. Until Lizzy ran into the street on the way back from the playground. Her biggest half-sister, Leanna, grabbed her arm and her elbow dislocated. Again. 

This is the third time she's had a "radial head subluxation" (aka "nursemaid's elbow"). The medical term sounds very dire (but then so does "suborbital hematoma", which means "black eye") and the colloquial term evokes a Mary Poppins-esque (the book, not the Disneyfied movie) Edwardian-era nanny, dragging her charges down the street by main force. Leanna feels bad. I told her not to, because a) I've done it in the same circumstance, and b) most of the women in my family have very loose joints so they pop out easily, and c) I'd rather Lizzy was in the E.R. for a dislocated elbow than because she was hit by a car. This is not like the nuts (where we discovered Abby's severe allergy because she and Leanna snuck food into their room) and it's not like the purple toe Abby got a couple weeks ago (where neither of them were watching where they put their body parts). This was a purely accidental booboo that could have been much worse had Leanna not reacted quickly.

Maybe this time the "don't run into the street" lesson will stick, since she's old enough to grok the consequences somewhat.

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