by Seth Greene
So my wife had to go to a Universal Pre-K meeting at my daughters nursery school.
So she left me with all three kids.
Two of my neighbors show up and ask if they can take Lillie for a walk around the block in her stroller. I say yes, one down.
Then they offer to take all the neighborhood girls in the driveway with her, and Ella agrees to go. Two down.
So they are going to leave me with all the boys (5 total).
The boys ask if they can do timed (stopwatch app on iphone) relay races on the lawn.
I say sure as this will keep them busy (and not fighting with each other), and me seated for a while.
Max takes his crocs off. Says they slow him down.
I tell him to put socks and sneakers on if he wants to race. He refuses.
One of the neighbors tells Max to put shoes on. He refuses.
Mistake #1.
The neighbors and all the girls leave.
On his third barefoot race, Max runs over the jagged edge of a neighbors drain in their lawn and starts screaming.
As Max hurts himself all the time, I don’t race over to him, I walk over.
I figure he will cry for 5 minutes and be fine. Mistake #2
I pick his foot up and it has blood dripping down it. Not one drip at a time, but it’s running down his leg and my arm.
I pick him up and carry him into the house, into the bathroom.
I’m not thinking clearly, so instead of going into the kitchen and grabbing paper towels,
I grab one of my wife’s favorite pink towels with Ella’s name on it and press that on his foot.
Mistake #3
Max is screaming bloody murder. He sucks when there’s blood involved. Totally freaks him out.
I pull the towel away to look at the cut and clean it.
Max sees the blood all over his leg, my arm, and the towel and the floor and starts screaming louder.
“Daddy, take me to pediatric urgent care! I don’t want to Die!”
Did I mention that Max can be a little bit dramatic?
After about two minutes the blood stops. I cover it in Neosporin and bandage him up.
I carry him to the living room and put him in the chair with an icepack.
His friends pound on the window at least three times to see what’s going on as they saw him get hurt and can hear him screaming.
I yell at them not to pound on the window that my wife broke doing the same thing a few weeks ago. I think I might have scared them off.
The chair isn’t working for Max’s foot, so he moves to the living room floor.
I would ask him to try not to bleed on the carpet, but I don’t think he can handle much right now.
I give Max a TV show, a drink, and a pop tart to help calm him down, so that I can clean up the mess.
I clean the kitchen floor that our cleaning lady just washed, I clean the bathroom floor, the sink, and change his shorts.
He is still crying in between the juice and the pop tart.
I cuddle him on the floor.
He asks me if I ever had a cut so bad, and how I survived. “How long did it take before it stopped hurting?”
After about 45 minutes, I remember that the neighbors still have both my daughters.
I should probably get them back before my wife shows up and wonders what the hell happened.
I text them and they say they still have the daughters (whew!) and will bring them right back.
At that moment Lillie decides to start crying in the stroller, and my wife pulls up.
So she comes home to a crying hungry baby, a still crying injured son, and a stressed out husband.
Luckily, Ella was fine. She just wants to know why Max got a pop tart when he didn’t eat all his dinner.
I give Ella a pop tart to shut her up.
Of course, now my wife wants to know what happened,
So Max has to relive the whole thing and start crying harder all over again now that Mommy is home.
Is it bedtime yet? Is there a sippy cup filled with vodka in the fridge?
Thank G-d my mother in law bought me both Jack Daniels and Absolute Vodka gift sets for Father’s Day.
