The time Hank broke his arm

Hank broke his arm. Most of you probably know this by now, but I figured I'd blog it for posterity... especially since I completely skipped his whole getting-stitches-in-his-chin experience last year. Oops.

Rewind five weeks. We're at one of the boys' favorite parks. We met up with a friend and her two boys and had a delightful time. Johnny was digging in the sand with his excavator, making sure other kids knew not to get too close to it because it was his. Hank was running around the park and then sprinting straight back when a kid got too close to his front end loader, exclaiming "No! Don't touch my earth-movers!" Even kids who were ten feet away and not even headed in that direction weren't safe from Johnny's and Hank's protective postures. Amy was snuggled in the wrap on my chest, sleeping, as per usual.

We did this for a couple of hours and then our friends went home. I, on the other hand, planned to stay for a while longer with the hope that a long car ride would induce a nap in one or both boys. The boys eventually abandoned their earth-movers, and decided to climb on the play structure there. Hank was hanging from a ring as he has done thousands of times before, but this time, Johnny pushed him pretty hard, and Hank landed right on his left arm.

Unfortunately, I didn't see it all happen. A very pregnant woman was packing up her sand toys and I bent over to pick up a few by my feet to help her out (I was just there and remember looking at sand toys on the ground and debating whether I should just leave them there...) and that's when Hank fell. I knew almost immediately that something was wrong. Hank is a tough kid. He's the kid that whacks his head on something, he says "ow", then shakes himself and gets back up to play. This time, he wouldn't stop crying. His wrist looked a little swollen, but not like you would expect a broken arm to look. However, he wouldn't grab my finger with his left hand and my mommy intuition was going off, so I made a command decision and we left for the ER.

I dropped Johnny off with John and Gail (my in-laws, thank goodness they were able to watch him!) and got John to meet me at Children's Hospital to help with Amy.

In the hospital exam room. He's so tough, this kid. Not crying about his broken arm, but definitely crying about the X-Ray that needs to taken.

A few hours and a lot of tears later, it was determined that Hank had a small, green-stick fracture in his distal radius of his left arm... his dominant arm. He had a cast put on and only asked me to take it off ten or twenty times before realizing that I had promised him chicken strips, fries and a milkshake at Smashburger after we were done. Not bad for a two-year-old with an uncomfortable cast.

He just got it off a few days ago and is doing great. We're still avoiding parks since the bone won't be up to strength for another couple of months and I'm supposed to keep him from climbing too high. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Good one, doc. Hank is... a thrill-seeker, to put it mildly. Keeping him off a jungle gym would be like trying to keep me away from raspberry chocolate truffle cheescake: someone's head would come off in the struggle to get to the prize.

Anyway. That's the story. Not all that thrilling, but we made it through four weeks of a cast without getting it soaked/ruined/broken. I call that a win.