Mercy Me! Mercy me!

Up until my little sister, Kimmy, came along and started tripping up the stairs, falling down the stairs, tumbling down steep hills while longboarding, etc., I was the accident prone child in our family. I'll give you some examples:

Age 2:
-Fell while "skating" in the bathtub and knocked out a front tooth. It didn't grow back until I was about 8 or so, and when it came in, it pushed the tooth beside it back, so they're both a little crooked.

-Tried to follow my older brothers in jumping off the top bunk of their bed and broke my leg.

Age 5:
-Put our station wagon into neutral and jumped out of the car while it was rolling down the hill at my grandparent's house. It was actually going pretty fast, and my head scraped along the pavement, scraping the skin clean off my head. It took 56 stiches on my scalp and 3 on my ear to fix me up. (Oh, and the car was stopped by two well placed trees just before it would have hit a huge propane tank and blown up the whole neighborhood. Pretty cool.)

-Pulled a board loose while climbing a fence with my brothers and got a nail stuck in my knee. That one hurt.

-Fell on my head while hanging in the backyard. It only took a few stitches to fix that one.

I think Marcus is our accident prone child. The kid is not quite fifteen months old and he's already been to the emergency room twice, because of the circumcision thing and the car accident. Plus, he just keeps getting hurt. He's constantly trying to keep up with Alyssa and Ethan, and he loves to climb, climb, climb!

Last week the vacuum was at the top of the stairs, and Alyssa took the electric cord and wound it down the banister as part of something she was imagine-playing. After a little while, I told her it wasn't such a good idea and told her to clean it up. As she was pulling the cord from the top of the stairs and it was flying back up the banister and whipping this way and that, Marcus just happened to come around the corner and get whapped in the face. He had a square shaped bruise from where the plug hit him, along with a nice cut along his eyebrow from one of the prongs. I almost took him to the emergency room for stitches, but it wasn't very big, and a butterfly bandage actually closed it up pretty god and it's healing nicely.

Then, tonight while we were at Michael and Tallia's house for our Chinese New Year celebration, Ethan and Asher were climbing up on a bech and jumping down. Marcus wanted to join them, but instead of climbing and jumping, he climbed up, stood up, lost his balance, and fell backward, hitting his chin on the bench. At first I thought he was just bonked, so I just loved him. Then I saw the blood. It bled a lot. I don't know if you can tell from the picture, but he's got a pretty good gash on his chin, a smaller cut just below that, and he's missing a huge chunk of skin inside his mouth, just under his lip. Once things settled down, and we were able to clear enough blood out of the way, we decided that the cut on the outside was closing up pretty well on its own, and didn't need stitches. We gave him a glass of water, and I held him, and he was back down and playing after just a few minutes.


But man, that kid sure does play hard.