Unforeseen Dangers

I'm blogging a lot about our children lately.  I guess that's because they're a big part of my day, and my emotion is often driven by what's going on with them.  Blogging is a way to process events and, sometimes, unburden myself from things that are swirling around in my mind, or share about our life to help people understand what it's like.

Last night, I was upstairs helping Rachel with something when I heard the worst kind of shriek from Ben, followed by scared crying.  If you're a parent, you probably (unfortunately) know that shriek - the "I hurt myself and it's still hurting, and I don't know what to do about it" panicky cry.  I ran down the stairs and found him in the living room with a block hanging off of his lip.

It was one of those big Megabloks, the chunky kind that are for younger children.  He likes taking 2 of the blocks and putting them together, then pulling them apart, or taking a stack that I've been putting together and taking ALL of them apart.  He sometimes uses them in the bathtub, too.

Neither James nor I had anticipated that there would be danger inherent in these blocks, since they're too large to get all the way into his mouth and become choking hazards.  But Ben likes to chew and bite on the blocks, which weakens them, and he had caused one of the pegs to get a crack around part of its base.  It opened enough to take in his lip, then clamped down.

I managed to get it off of his lip, but his lip was cut either from the block itself or the processing of removing it.  Blood ALL OVER, holy cow.  It took about an hour, during which we debated going to Urgent Care or seeing if we could stop the bleeding at home, before we got it to come to a stop.  The advice to put direct pressure on a lip wound for 10 minutes would not work with Ben, but I was able to do it in short spurts and also got him to suck on an Outshine popsicle, which helped the bleeding to slow down.  He also chewed and bit on a cool wet washcloth, which helped to slow things down and absorbed some of the copious amounts of blood.  And eventually, we left it alone and watched, and the blood clotted and he stopped actively bleeding.

YIKES.

Sometimes we just can't anticipate the things that he can turn into a danger for himself or others.  He got ahold of a glass from the kitchen counter while I was following him downstairs to the kitchen after a diaper change, then dropped it when he saw me, sending glass shards all across the kitchen floor.  He took an aluminum can out of the recycling bin last year and cut his thumb so badly that I took him to the ER because I couldn't get it to stop bleeding.  I now have a medical superglue to fix a cut at home if someone gets a cut like that happens again, but I couldn't put it on his lip.  He'll eat candles, deodorizer beads, pencil erasers, tips of marker pens and all sorts of things.

It's so hard to try to keep one step ahead of him, and sometimes we're not.  And then we feel bad when he hurts himself, but we also realize that there's only so much we can anticipate and try to protect him.  And we continue to pray that he'll develop a sense of safety so that his environment isn't so hazardous for him and we can one day take down baby gates and remove child-safety locks and stop having to lock all the interior doors of the house so that he doesn't get into our rooms and get into something he shouldn't.