Catching up

Erik has (re)discovered mangoes. The other day I cut one up and put it in a bowl for him, which he enjoyed. I looked up from what I was doing to see that he had mashed it up, rubbed it on his hands and applied it to his face and hair, as you would soap or moisturiser.




D'Arcy went to a folk festival a few weeks ago and bought presents. Erik's was a fantastic deerstalker which he loves to bits. He finds it and whacks it on his head at any opportunity.



E has discovered the joys of going out for coffee. He likes a babycino, but more than that he likes to play in the water glasses.



Erik's first impulse buy. We were at BigW looking for more shoes for E. I picked these up to have a look at them and he was smitten. We couldn't leave the shoe aisle without the boots. Like his hat, he finds them and puts them on, or brings them to me to put on. I think they represent 'going outside' to him, he probably actually asking to go out, rather than just have his boots on.



We had two Thanksgiving dinners, one with just the four of us as D was going to his dad's and then one with a friend and my mum and stepfather. Lots of fun. Lots of food, though I think I slightly overdid it on the rich stuff. My liver was not happy the next day!



I got a phone call from D'Arcy's school on Wednesday at lunchtime saying "D'Arcy's fine, but he's cut his knee on a nail under the carpet. We've put a band-aid on it and sent him back to class, but I'm just letting you know because it's going to be sore". He was supposed to go to basketball that afternoon, but his step-mum dropped him home to me instead. About 45 minutes later he said "mum, my knee is bleeding!" And it was, dripping on the floor in fact. Through the band-aid, which was actually two large band-aids in a cross. Because his dad didn't let me vaccinate him as a baby I was already in the process of negotiating a tetanus shot, so we got in the car and went off to the health clinic. The nurse there took off the band-aid and she and I both kind of recoiled at the sight of the wound underneath. It was quite a lot worse than I'd been led to believe. The nurse said "What time did this happen? Why on earth didn't they tell you this needed to be looked at? Don't they know there's only an 8 hour window for stitching a wound?" About 6 hours had elapsed by this time, so we only just scraped in through the window, what with the time it took to find a doctor to do the honours. D'Arcy was very scared, and the process hurt a lot, but he was great. He said the worst bit was the injection of the local anaesthetic, but once that was done he was interested in what was going on, though I wouldn't let him watch the stitching. He ended up with 9 stitches and the tetanus shot (which will need repeating in two and again in four months) and he will have a lovely arrow shaped scar. When I rang the school the next morning to say that D wouldn't be in, I mentioned the surprise of the nurse that we hadn't been advised to get it looked at. The receptionist was really quite defensive about the care that he'd received from them (one of the people who treated it at school was trained as a nurse) and implied that I was over-reacting. I wasn't very happy about that. We have to take him back in a week to get the stitches looked at, and, I hope, removed.

Oh yeah, just remembered that today is Erik's half birthday (one and a half).