I feel as if I’ve written this post before. OH because I HAVE, just with a different child.

This afternoon I was on the phone with a friend talking about kids, photography, football, breast cancer… you know, the normal stuff when I hear:

“THWACKTHUDCRASH” followed by the scream.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll never hear it.

It’s that scream that reaches down into the marrow of your bones and chills you from the inside out.  The scream that sends every mom-sense you have into overload.

Into the phone, I said/hollered/scrambled; “I have to go” and threw it down onto the couch.

I was greeted with a screaming Monkey rubbing the back of his head and he was oddly covered in red.

It took a nanosecond that felt like a minute for my brain to register that the red was blood and his hand was smearing it from the back of his head to the top and back down again and that more was running down his back.

I snatched him up and ran with him in my arms to the bathroom

Where I lay him down face first, grabbed a towel, applied pressure to the blood, oh.my.good.giddy.aunt. the blood. the pulsing, flowing, flowing, gushing, blood pouring out of my son’s head. (I’m the one who is ALWAYS calm when there’s blood or someone’s injured, this time… I wavered really close to panic)

I wrapped him in an arm, pressed the towel to his head with the other and had my daughter call my husband.

“Come home NOW. Monkey split his head open and it’s a gaping wound and there’s so much blood, and it’s his head and come. home. now.”

My amazing 6 yo grabbed my purse, shut the front door and helped me get Monkey into his car seat. “Do NOT move. Keep your head pressed against the towel and don’t move”

Bless his sweet heart, he didn’t.

First, the closest medical place: a minor emergency clinic. Where I was told; without them even looking at him: “we can’t help you. go to a real ER”

I hit the ER and after a decent 30 minute wait, we were seen.

A lot of painful squeezing and pressing, some “special” soap and two staples into his skull WITHOUT any anaesthetic or numbing agents of any kind thankyouverymuch (because my kid is awesome); he was back to doing cartwheels, charming the nurses and doctors and showing off his Secret Agent Perry/Kung Fu Panda skills.

He has a bump the size of a big bouncy ball, two staples and I have blood trail through my house.  He is quite recovered and as his pre-k teacher put it: “by Tuesday, this will be a fighting an Alligator story” (boy does she know him)

Nathan and I…. we may take a day or two to recover.

The offending chair and the fireplace

The hallway

The Towel

At the ER

His head

The Staples

I’ll tell y’all this much.. these were NOT the first pictures that I expected to take with the lens of amazingness that I rented for his birthday weekend.