Of His First Boo-Boo

Emmett's favorite place while I'm cooking dinner is always right there in the kitchen with me.  Sometimes he happily plays along in his sister's miniature kitchen, pulling out all his favorite toys and rifling through the cabinet, as he knows he's not allowed to do so in the real kitchen.  Sometimes, though, he throws caution to the wind and decides to push the boundaries.

This evening, as he was testing to see which cabinet doors could be pulled open without Mommy protesting, he found (for the first time) the area where I store all of our empty food jars that I hope someday I will actually use.  Realizing a) he was opening a cabinet door (which is off-limits in and of itself) and b) this particular cupboard was filled with breakable glass, I quickly reprimanded him and then moved on with dinner preparations.

Yet, it was only seven seconds later that I heard the unmistakable sound of glass hitting our tile floor.  Lovely.

As I whirled around, seeing our son surrounded by broken glass, I rushed over, yet not before he got a particularly large piece in his hand.  Panicking, I gingerly took the dangerous shard from him, inspected his hands for any sign of injury and, finding none, spanked his hand, scolded him and set him far away from the scene.  But being home alone and still having to pick up this mess before either child tried to investigate further, I made a quick mental checklist of how to clean up glass and did a mad dash to the pantry for a paper bag to hold the very sharp edges.

And it apparently took that twelve seconds for my son to crawl his little hiney back to the scene of the crime and pick up yet another offending piece of glass.  And this time he wasn't quite as lucky.  By the time I got to him (again) there were traces of blood on his knee (even his sister was concerned as she asked, "He hurt his leg?").  I whisked him off to the counter to do a close investigation to determine the source of the blood and traced it back to a small drop on the ring finger of his itty bitty left hand.

If you've never experienced it before, the sight of blood on your child almost makes you want to cry and definitely made me want to call my husband and demand he rush home to help me deal with this disaster.  And then I pulled myself together and realized I could handle cleaning up a tiny cut and also manage to remove the dangerous glass from the floor before further injury was incurred.  I just knew I could do it.

So, with the help of big sister, who stood calmly by her brother the whole time, whispering reassurances like, "It's okay, Emmett.  Your hand be okay" and delivering soft kisses to his cheek, I soaked up the blood (which seemed to be never-ending for such a minuscule infraction), dotted it with Neosporin and placed the tiniest band-aid I could find around his little finger.  Micaiah warned him gently, "Don't take off the band-aid; it make your finger better."

Then, while his little guardian watched over him in our bedroom, I quickly and effectively cleared the kitchen of all danger.

Disaster averted.  And I didn't even have to call Philip.

Wow.

You'd think this was my first child.  This little Penguin has no idea what it's getting itself into.  It just better stay out of the cabinets, that's all I have to say.