The Boy Got Broke

Well, after many years of jumping, bouncing and leaping through the air, Simon finally broke his arm. It happened like this:

We have a large dog crate in our basement, which we use periodically to keep Liesl (a Husky mix) in when we have big parties. The crate is about 3 feet tall. A few weeks ago I brought it upstairs for the kids to use as a fort. They love it. We also have some large rubber balls the kids love to play with. The balls are about 1.5 feet in diameter.

Well, the other night we were watching The Simpsons and I was researching telescope eyepieces online. Barb was upstairs. When I wasn't looking Simon apparently took one of the big rubber balls, put it on top of the dog crate and started bouncing on it. I didn't see it happen, but I very definitely heard a "CRASH" followed by a prolonged "SCREAM".

In and of itself this is not unusual. As I mentioned, Simon is a natural born jumping, leaping, bouncing machine. He is always banging himself up and he often screams like crazy when he does it. What was unusual is how long he screamed and how long it seems to hurt him. He usually forgets about a minor injury after about 3 minutes. Not so this time. He was still crying and moaning after 15 minutes so we figured something was really wrong.

So, I took him to the ER. Fortunately, we were their only customers that night and they got us in and out pretty quickly. Well, we were there for about an hour and a half, but it felt pretty quick to us. I had the forthought to bring along some of Simon's Garfield books so we spent the time reading those to each other. It took that long to get the X-Rays read and to find out that he really did break it, but after that we got to come home. It was after midnight at this point, but we were both wide awake so I got us some McDonald's fries and we came home to watch some Star Trek before heading off to bed.

They did give us a CD with his X-Rays on it, though, so we could bring it to his doctor. Of course we made copies of our own. Here they are:


As you can see, it isn't the most serious break in the world. But it was apparently quite painful.

Here's a picture of Simon and Gwen today:
Broken Boy and Princess Girl!

Hmm, between her messed up hair and the crazed look on her face, Gwen looks more like "Feral Princess Girl". (Actually, Gwen's personality seems perfectly consistent with the image of a cheerleader raised by wolves, but that's another story. :)

So, because he busted up his writing arm we've declared an early "Spring Break" here at Shady Tree Academy. No more lessons for a couple of weeks. At least the boy isn't hampered from reading his Garfield books. He's totally obsessed lately. He stays up hours later than everyone else just reading Garfield. I wonder where he gets that from?

Oh, and I moved the dog crate back down in the basement. I know he'll find other things to bounce on and leap from, but at least I'll get rid of the obvious candidates.