I'm Having Flashbacks, And Not Good Ones

Well, it's official, I always thought I might not be parental material, and now I realize I might have been right. A bit of back story is in order I suppose. Lately whenever we leave the kids together playing invariably one will start whining / crying about something. And it's usually because one of them has done something that's upset the other. Don't get me wrong, there are times when they can play together and be sweet to one another, but more often than not one will do something to irritate the other. Sometimes it's something minor like "he pushed" or "she took my toy and won't give it back" or something along those lines. The same old same old I suspect (but have no direct firsthand experience) that most siblings do to one another.

So today when we got back from church Ginger and the kids were going to go over to Ken and Karen's to see Amanda for a play date. The kids had gone out to the garage to get into the car and Ginger was in the library looking up a restaurant to order pizza so she could pick it up on the way over. So then I heard Quinn crying from the garage. I started walking towards the garage and I could hear him crying still and a little louder, and all I could think of was what in the world are those two doing to each other now. So imagine my surprise when I opened the door and Quinn was crying outside the car and he had his finger stuck in the car door hinge that was closed. My heart literally sank. And then I completely freaked and I do mean completely. I moved and opened the car door and got his finger out. Luckily it was just tip of his pinky, but it was already bruised and now Quinn was really crying (and to be honest at this point, who could blame him). I yelled for Ginger and then I started having what I can only assume was an episode of post traumatic stress disorder.

See, back when I was young (sometime around sixth grade) I did something similar and shut my thumb in a car door. The difference I guess was it wasn't just the tip of my thumb, but at the joint and I was old enough to know to open the door myself (unlike Quinn who claims he wasn't able to reach to the door handle). Oh yea, and in my case my thumb started bleeding. Profusely. To the point where I had never seen that much blood exiting my body before. I ended up needing several stitches and the whole incident apparently scarred me much worse than I would have thought since seeing something vaguely similar happen to Quinn totally freaked me out. Luckily Ginger maintained her cool during the whole incident and was the voice of reason. And later she did comment that I was uncharacteristically out of it during the incident and that she had never seen me act like that before.


We called the pediatrician and they told us that since it wasn't bleeding that it might be fractured or it might be bleeding under the nail and we needed to monitor it to determine whether we would have to take Quinn to the hospital to drill through the nail to relieve the pressure. We gave Quinn some ibuprofen while we were waiting, and after a while it didn't look any worse and Quinn was actually able to slightly bend it. So not hospital visit yet, although we may revisit that tomorrow depending on how it looks. It took over an hour for Quinn to completely settle down and be back to his somewhat normal self. I think it also probably took that long for the ibuprofen to kick in.

Since then though I have been completely racked with guilt over the fact that I didn't react faster when I first heard him crying. Realistically I wouldn't have gotten there more than maybe 5 or 10 seconds earlier at most. But that doesn't change the fact that now I feel like I really dropped the ball on this one. Luckily Quinn has seemed pretty chipper for the rest of the day. He eventually felt well enough to go over to Amanda's for their play date and Ginger says he was very active there and didn't complain about his finger hurting during the visit. I went ahead and went to work for a bit while they were gone and then the whole group went out for dinner to Coastal Flats. When I saw his finger at dinner it did look like the bruise had spread a little and gotten a bit worse, but still wasn't taking up the entire fingernail yet. I'm pretty sure with this amount of trauma his fingernail is going to completely fall off at some point soon.


Normally I would have led the post with a this picture of Catherine who looked really cute in her dress she wore to church (at least in my opinion). Too bad the events that followed made it hard to focus on the positives of the day.