dave & janet horsman ::: keepin’ it real since 1998

Pictured above, Zeke’s pet for a day, Inchy, was pretty much the highlight of our Memorial Day.  (Well, besides Noah being diagnosed with a fractured wrist…I’ll get to that story in a bit.)  Zeke fell in love with this little guy, kept him in a plastic cup all night beside his bed and woke up this morning asking if we might get a more suitable habitat for him.  I thought I’d oblige since the kids can’t really have any other kind of pet in these apartments (well, there’s fish…but we’ve been there, done that already).  So, shortly after Elijah and Zeke left for school, Noah, Phoebe and I took off for Target in search of a bug container of sorts.  Inchy was left in the plastic cup, which was deemed to be a safe place to leave him for a bit, since he had yet to attempt an escape.  But alas, with no big, scary humans in sight, it seems he decided to make a break for it and upon our return home he was gone…gone, baby, gone.  So sad.  Zeke’s been out looking for a replacement Inchy all evening. 

And yes, if you haven’t already heard, my baby boy has a fractured wrist!  To be honest, I’ve always figured this day would eventually come, the way this kid plays.  He never slows down and lacks any kind of healthy fear of anything.  Add to this that he’s incredibly tough, and seems to have a super-high tolerance for pain, and it’s a recipe for disaster!

But anyway, here’s the story…

I was at a park alone with all four kids on Saturday evening.  (I know, I’m crazy…but Dave had been out of town since Thursday morning, and I guess I just wanted a change of scenery…and it was a gorgeous night.)  Everything was going great.  Elijah and Zeke were playing some kind of chase game, ie: wearing themselves out , Phoebe was all over the twirly slide and Noah, in his usual, outgoing way, had befriended a little girl.  (Interestingly he gets along amazingly well with 5-6 year old girls.  My theory is is that little girls this age are bossy and Noah doesn’t mind being bossed.  Hee hee.) 

But then Noah got it into his head that he had to conquer the monkey bars.  Very high  monkey bars.  I asked him to please stay off of these ones as I needed to stay close to Phoebe and wouldn’t be able to help him.  But…well, he didn’t listen.  With one hand on the first monkey bar, he lost his balance and fell from the four foot platform while reaching for the second monkey bar and landed squarely on his outstretched hand.  He did cry pretty hard at first, but only for a few minutes… and then went right back to playing!  He favored it a bit throughout the evening, but when he fell sound asleep shortly after we arrived home, I thought it couldn’t be hurting enough for it to be badly hurt.  There wasn’t any swelling either, and I always thought that that would accompany a serious injury.

The next day, Sunday, though, I began to suspect that something was wrong when he continued to favor it and also when he seemed to “re-injure” it several times by doing something that normally wouldn’t hurt a wrist.  Daddy arrived home just before supper on Sunday (Hurrah!) and he agreed that the first order of business for Memorial Day would be to bring Noah to an Urgent Care. 

So that’s what was done, the resulting x-ray showed a couple of fractures on his right wrist and the the Urgent Care Dr. fitted Noah with a splint until we could get an appointment with an orthopedic specialist. 

And so ends the story of Noah and the Horsman family’s first broken bone.  Hopefully this will be the last too, but something tells me that we’re really just at the tip of the iceberg of “bringing up boys.”  …Totally worth it though.  I love my boys.