Kicking and Screaming

This is an interesting post about an unpleasant experience.

On Saturday, Kaitlyn got her fingers smashed in a door. Emily was going to the bathroom. Kaitlyn finds this an interesting experience and was following her in. This annoys Emily so she shut (and locked) the bathroom door. Unfortunately, Kaitlyn's fingers were in the area where the hinges are.

Kaitlyn didn't cry much at first. She just kind of whimpered and looked at me. From my angle, I couldn't see that she was injured. I just thought she was whining because she wanted in to the bathroom. Then she fell and hung there by her fingers. I kind of panicked and lost my temper at Emily who didn't open the door very fast. In retrospect, I think that she was having trouble getting the door unlocked. We now have a rule that she can't lock the doors in the house.

So, the door comes open and the middle fingernail has been completely pulled out and is flipped upside down over the front of the finger. It is barely attached at all. That is when I learned that only about half of a persons fingernail is actually visible. Almost 50% of it is under the skin!

Anyway, I put the fingernail back on top of finger (not back inside) and wrapped a bandaid around it to hold it in place. Patrick called Kirsten (she was at work) to let her know that he was at home watching Emily and I was on my way to the Emergency Room. I was very glad that Kirsten was able to leave work early and come to the ER, because of the kicking and screaming issue.

As most of you know, Kaitlyn doesn't care for strangers. She took to Kirsten pretty well, but it took her about a month to warm up to me. Anyway, it seems that strangers at a Doctors office are 10 times as bad. First, the Doctor needed to look at the hand. It took Kirsten and I both to hold her still for that. Then they needed to take three X-Ray's. It took Kirsten, I and the Radiologist to hold her steady for that. I would really like to have seen those X-Ray's, because there were at least two adult hands along with Kaitlyn's in each one of them.

Well, none of the fingers were broken, so now it was just a matter of putting the fingernail back. This involved a numbing shot, some tweezer like instruments to help put the fingernail back, one Doctor to do the work and two nurses, one dad and one mom to hold the little 23 pound ball of fire. I have a new appreciation for the phrase "Kicking and Screaming the whole way."

Kaitlyn fought the process so hard that her hair was completely soaked with sweat. She whimpered and cried the whole time we were at the ER, but she was giggling and playing within in seconds of leaving. She didn't want the stuffed dinosaur that they gave her until we left. Now it is one of her favorite bedtime animals.

Now we get to the bandage. They put a few layers of gauze bandage on her entire finger, stretched the trailing ends down across her palm, wrapped them a few times around her wrist and tied it off. Then they put a tight fishnet type of mitten on her hand. All of this lasted about 30 minutes. We had settled down on the couch at home while we were trying to get something for her to eat. I glanced over and she was happily playing with the bandage which she had removed. Since then, we have put on several bandaids, but they rarely last more than an hour.

Well, kids sure do make your life more interesting.

Disneyland Vacation

We are back from our vacation to Disney. We were gone for seven days. We spent parts of five days going to Disneyland and/or California Adventure. We took Emily and Kaitlyn back to the hotel for naps everyday. We also spent one whole day at Legoland.

I will write more about the trip later. In the interim, here are a few pictures from the trip.

Trip to the Zoo

Yesterday we took a trip to the zoo. We needed to get out of the house for a while and decided to that a trip to the zoo would be a nice family outing. Also, it would be a good trial run for our upcoming trip to Disneyland. Everything went pretty well, except for the snack situation. It is obvious to us that we need to take a lot more snacks with us when we got to Disneyland. Also, we determined that girls can easily handle going an hour or two past nap time and still be mostly pleasant to be around, as long as they have plenty to eat and drink.

While we were there, we bumped into my sister and her family. It was nice to see them for a few minutes. I found it funny that their family and ours are both have yearly memberships to the zoo and both forgot their new membership cards and brought the expired ones instead.

Here are a few photos of the day: