You Gotta Protect the Noggin!

N-man, unfortunately, has inherited my coordination. Or more precisely, my complete lack of coordination. He's even improved upon my clumsiness, if that's possible. You know how in Twilight you go mad with the endless descriptions of Bella's clumsiness? Yeah, well multiply that by 100 and you've got N-man. He's always tripping or bumping or falling.

So last night right before dinner, he fell off the back of the couch, onto a tile floor.

This is not the first time this has happened.

While the kids are already 3.5, we only just took all the zillions of foam pads off the floors, and that was only because we had to make the house look nice to show it. It was really too soon, though, to un-pad the joint.

He screamed and cried, and calmed down while I held him. And fell asleep.

Darn it. Concussion sign number 1. With N-man as your child, believe me, you have concussion signs memorized.

But, having been through all this before, I know not to even start to worry yet. It's surprisingly common for kids to fall asleep after a head bump, and not cause for big concern. As long as you can wake them up. I poked him a bit, and he peeked open his little eyes. He seemed reluctant to wake up, so I broke out the big guns: "N-man, do you want an Oreo?" His eyes flew open and an excited "YES!" was given. He walked over, had his Oreo, and then just sat quietly on the couch until dinner time. If anyone knows the second major sign of a concussion, you'll know right now that an Oreo was a bad, bad idea. But we'll get there.

We started dinner, and N-man didn't want to eat anything. He just curled up in my arms. About halfway through dinner, he started to complain his head was hurting. Poor babe! TK got him some Tylenol. N-man started crying, I started worrying, then N-man threw up. All over ME! Oreo vomit, too, so it was grossly black and crumby. Ack! First, yuck. But second and more importantly, we can now check off "concussion sign number 2". Now it's time to worry.

I rip my clothes off, TK cleans up N-man, and I call the pedi's office. Yep, they're calling ahead to the ER, off we go.

N-man wants me to go, but I know that since I'm pregnant, I'm not going to be able to go in with him if he needs any x-rays done. B-man doesn't want to be left home without N-man. We bundle up the whole family.

By the time we got to the ER, N-man was acting completely fine. I mean, if I hadn't seen him fall and watched him the past hour, I never would have believed he bumped his head. He said nothing was hurting. But no way am I going home without him being checked!

We saw a triage nurse. When she asked N-man how he was feeling, he insisted "I feel PERFECT!" He really didn't want to be in the ER.

So we waited for about an hour before getting taken back to a room, and maybe a half hour in the room before seeing a doctor. Hey, I'm fine with that. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd much rather be the least important case in the ER than the case that needs to be seen ASAP!

The doctor agrees that N-man seems fine, but since he'd vomited, she wanted to keep him a few hours for observation. It was after 8 pm by then, but okay. So we just stayed in the ER for a few hours. The local ER is actually pretty nice and has a reasonably good pediatric section. Books, a few toys, and once you're in a room, there's a DVD player and a long list of kids DVDs you can borrow. We watched Aladdin, then approximately 97 hours of The "Best" of Thomas the Train. Okay, fine, it wasn't 97 hours. It just felt like 97 hours. And I added the quotes around "Best". I just have to say, though, that if that was the best, then the worst of Thomas must have been banned by the Geneva Convention as a form of torture.

Can you tell Thomas isn't my favorite? I can take an episode or two. They're thankfully short. But watching 1,000 episodes in a row far exceeds my tolerance level. Oh, did I mention that while they were long on kids entertainment, there was really nothing for parents besides an old issue of Parents Magazine that I'd already read? And I forgot to bring a book to read? (That's how you can tell how worried I was about N-man. I never go anywhere without a book!)

But we all made it. N-man continued to be just fine. Neither TK nor I went insane from Thomas. And B-man and N-man ended up having a great time, getting to stay up late and watch TV and eat ice pops. The boys were home and tucked into bed, snoozing, by 10:30 last night.

So that was our adventure. All's well that end's well, but I swear, that kid is going to give me grey hairs with all the falling on his head he does. Am I allowed to make him wear his bike helmet around the house?

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One more quick N-man story from the ER adventure. He's so suspicious of everyone. When the lady in admissions wanted to put the ID bracelet on his arm, he wouldn't let her. She explained that he needed to wear it so everyone would know who he was.

With his arms still held firmly at his side, he said calmly, and with much authority and a tinge of disdain, "But I'm N-man!" There was very much a VIP tone in his voice, as if to say "those peons might need identification, but EVERYONE should know who I am!" We all burst out laughing!