First Finger Fright for my Five year old

Henry Post-op(bad phone photo) with some presents

 Today is Henry's 5th Birthday and we spent most of the day at the Science Center with the Chous and Gammie and Grandpa Hohl.  Henry was an angel all day and had so much fun with his cousins.  We even ran into Thomasin and Marta for the last couple hours and they joined in on the fun at Sports Works. On the way home it started to rain so I turned on the wiper in the back where both boys were sitting, facing backward.  Our car is falling apart and the back panel keeps falling off and at this point all the mechanics of the hatch door are exposed, especially the wiper arm.  As we pulled into our garage, Henry gets the bright idea to stick his left pointer finger into a hole in the mechanical arm of the wiper blade and in so doing, almost sliced off his finger.  He had a deep wound that went from just below his cuticle diagonally under his nail bed and slicing into his skin.  When I opened the back to let the boys out, Henry was holding his bloody finger in his other hand and looked at me saying, " I stuck my finger in the hole and I just didn't know!" I felt so horrible for my sweet Birthday boy! I rushed him into the house, rinsed it, and as I rinsed I realized just how deep it was. I wrapped it up in tissues and tape and called Justin to come home.  He arrived home quickly with supplies and examined the patient.  He decided to take him for an x-ray at the Children's Hospital (no break) and came home to finish the repair.  Complete with gloves, tools, a couple beautiful assistants and some freezer paper as a sterile surface, Justin was ready to go.  I held Henry on my lap with Gammie Lynn holding his arm as Justin injected lidocane into his finger quite a few times.  Henry cried, but didn't really pull his arm back or freak out like I had expected him to do and was so brave.  After his finger was numb, Justin was free to do the surgery.  He removed the nail and put four or five stitches across his nail bed and then reinserted his nail into the cuticle, which assists in the new nail growing back.  Justin commented that this surgery was even more complicated than any of the other surgeries he had done that day.  The whole time Henry was content to boss Kaitlin and Wee-o on the proper techniques to navigate through levels of Little Big Planet and had little interest in the bloody stump of a finger his dad was working on.  Justin wrapped it all up and then we ate linguine with meat balls for dinner and a Hazelnut cake with dark chocolate coating on top, opened presents and let the kids eat some candy and it was a wonderful Birthday!

Recent pic

He looks so grown up to me.  I can totally see how he's going to look as an adult in this picture.  So handsome!

Do you Strew?

I got this idea to "strew" the other day by leaving things out for Henry and Bea to find to see if they're interested in them and it works! It's an actual technique to indirectly teach.  I feel like I can keep them busy when I feel like putting things out, not when I'm in the middle of feeding Clementine or doing the dishes or cooking.  I finally have some control around here!   Henry found a note pad and pencil I left out and decided to make treasure maps and instructions on how to make a tent, which took him about a half hour to create and then we went on a treasure hunt and made his tent, only after following his very detailed and numbered instructions and then we had a Birthday party in the tent.  The most fun part of our treasure hunt was when after we found the loot we all hugged each other and jumped and chanted, "we're rich!, we're rich!" Both kids were laughing hysterically and so was I.  Henry is so much fun!