Two weeks after Jane's accident and her cast is still, miraculously, on. Although she has managed to fall on the cast and scrap her forehead badly. She also sneezed while sitting at the kitchen table and banged her chin since her head was only a few inches off the tabletop (can you picture this? It must have really hurt but was pretty funny to watch.)
She is so much more coordinated than Scott was at this age and yet she seems to get her fair share of injuries. Maybe it is because he was so overly cautious and she seems to just keep going. One time last summer she slipped on some playground equipment and then went right back up the same monkey bar ladder thing. At a little over two, Scott would have avoided that piece of equipment for weeks if he had had an incident.
This just illustrates how much more difficult it can be for some people to exist in the world. For Jane, every new experience is fun and exciting, even if she might get hurt a little along the way. For Scott, every new experience has the opportunity to go wrong in a way that makes him feel uncomfortable.
She has had to make some adjustments: The first few nights she woke up crying when she couldn't soothe herself with her thumb. More than one person has said that this may be the thing that gets her over the thumb sucking habit. I really didn't have any problem with it. But they may be right, she hasn't even tried to get her thumb in her mouth for over a week now. I wish this was the thing that got her to use the potty (I'll have to elaborate on my potty training failure, Round II, in a separate post). She is also having trouble doing two-handed things, like holding her yogurt cup with her left hand while spooning with the right. Or securing a crayon so that she can rip the paper label off (a personal favorite of mine since I just love to pick up tiny pieces of paper). The cast is slipping but she pushes it back into place herself while telling me she is fixing it. When she spilled a cup of water on her arm, I just used the hair dryer to clean it up. She even sits patiently while we wrap her arm in a ziplock baggie before her bath and then exclaims, "See! All dry!", when she is done.
Oh, and her asthma is back, slightly. Probably brought on by seasonal allergies. So we have to give her nightly doses of Clarinex and a nebulizer treatment. Poor thing. She kind of likes the "neeby", though, because someone (usually me) actually sits with her for a few minutes while she does it!!
I am also pleasantly surprised that she has not been asking me when the cast will come off. Maybe she is just used to it and doesn't think about it. I am pretty sure Scott would have asked me at least a thousand times a day how long he'd have to wear the cast and when, exactly, he'd get it off. I like how she's perfected her story, too, from not knowing exactly what happened to the version I heard this afternoon: "I was climbing on the ladder to the slide and then my foot slipped, see, here, this foot, the left one. And then I looked behind me, like this, and I fell. With my arm out, like this, and hit the ground. And I was crying. And I had to go to the hospital." Oh, for the love of the drama.
When Scott realized all the attention she was getting he said, "You know how I am
going
to be an athlete, right? Well, I am sure I am going to get like a million casts from injuries and stuff". OK, tough guy, we'll see. In case you didn't know, Scott has the lofty goal of playing both basketball for Villanova and football for the University of Michigan. I will support him in his quest to be the first two-sport two school college athlete in history.
It should be interesting to see what happens when the cast comes off next week. I wonder if the doctor will be surprised to find sand, tomato from the chopped pizza and bits of chocolate bunny in there.
Comments