Stitches

Last night, we were with 7 other couples and 9 other little kids at one of our favorite restaurants for a going-away party.

Ivy and two other girls were running up and down a short hallway by our table. They'd been playing for an hour and half between bites of quesadilla and sips of chocolate milk.

Ivy tripped and fell flat on her face. We saw her crying, and Jeremy picked her up wiping blood off her face. By the time he got over to my chair, we knew it was her chin, not her mouth.

She had a huge gaping laceration across her whole chin. We raced over to Children's ER to get her fixed up. As soon as we got in there, the nurse put some numbing cream on her chin and covered it with a clear bandage. After a short wait, we got into a room. A very nice woman named Mindy came in to show Ivy what the suture nurse was going to do. Then someone came in to give Ivy some tylenol with codeine.

When Ivy fell, she screamed but let me put a napkin on her chin. I sat between the car seats on the way to the hospital, singing "Ivy, Ivy, Ivy." She was pretty quiet the whole time we were in the ER. Although, she looked sad and overwhelmed a lot. She was still easily distracted with Nick Jr and coloring. And a red popsicle.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity--really about two hours from the fall--the doctor and the suture nurse came in. Get this! The dr used to work at the Children's hospital in Hollywood.

I laid down next to Ivy for stitches. Mindy held up a dvd player for Ivy to watch Finding Nemo. She screamed like crazy during the first stitching, but she didn't move at all. After the first couple stitches, Nemo kept her attention. It took a while to do all the stitches, because her chin kept bleeding.

She got nine stitches total: two inside and seven outside. We have to keep ointment on it for five days, and she'll get them out after seven days.

She is not real happy about taking tylenol and motrin. And she doesn't like getting the ointment put on.

She has said things like "ouchie chin" and "floor ouchie." so she knows what happened. It's not slowing her down though. Makes me nervous to see her running around.