Blood, Blood, Guts and Gore! What Do You Think Those Teeth Are For?

Nathan must have realized last week that he had not injured himself in a long time. Not being one to sit by and let an opportunity pass, he made up for lost time by hurting himself twice. First, since he's teething again (or still), he has been sucking on his fingers a lot recently. Well, he got a little overzealous and started chewing on them and took a little chunk out of his finger. The cut itself wasn't so bad, but since he is constantly getting drool, food, and who knows what else in it, it got infected. Have you ever tried to hold a warm compress on an active baby's hand? It should be an Olympic sport. (Bob Costas: "It's been a rough season for Mutchler in this event - earlier in the year he had his glasses ripped off, took a washcloth to the eye, and was kicked in a rather uncomfortable place. Lets see how he does with the world watching...") Fortunately, the finger seems to be improving. I'm still limping a little, though.

The more exiciting injury came on Saturday. My friend Beth defended her dissertation Friday and had a little party on Saturday to celebrate. Nathan was crawling around and playing on a table with a very low shelf. In the blink of an eye, he slipped and feel teeth-first into the little shelf. Setting several land-speed records, Mommy got to him first and was consoling him when somebody noticed that there was a little blood on her shirt. It turns out that he hit his upper gums on the edge of the shelf and was bleeding like a stuck pig. From his point of view, this was not a big deal. The truly traumatic part was when Mommy and Daddy tried to stick a paper towel in his mouth to stop the bleeding. He cried longer and louder for that than for the actual injury. Poor little guy.

I'm still trying to decide if we are ahead of or behind the curve in terms of child injuries that involve blood. Either way, that incident motivated me to finally try to install all those silly child-locks on the cabinets. I'm convinced that the people that designed these never tried to install them. So far I've installed two locks successfully and only sworn 5 or 6 times. I'll update the score when I finish the kitchen, it its not too embarassing.