Ironically soon after I posted yesterday's bokadoo entry, Isaac was attacked by a large one and for a short time I thought he might need medical attention. It was largely my fault. One the way home from school, Isaac revealed two facts: he got in trouble for acting out at lunch time, and apparently due to scheduling issues he had no playing time (no outside nor gym) all day. It was quite a nice afternoon and so I lobbied for putting on our gear and playing in the snow, but Isaac would have none of it. However, he's been quite interested in knocking down our many gutter icicles, which are in a double row like sharks teeth, using inappropriate tools such as a shovel or an ax.
However as I was carrying things in from the car I realized (as I was walking past the icicles) that our new string mop would make a fairly harmless weapon against icicles, and perhaps this was a project that would allow Isaac to get some of his, well, ENERGY out before settling into the house. Surely he couldn't break a window or kill anyone with a nice soft string mop, right? So I handed him the mop and said, "Wanna smash some icicles?"
Oh hell YEAH!
Not that he says hell, but that was in effect his response.
So he set to the project with great gusto and smashed a whole row of them off one side of the house. But then he remembered other low-hanging fruit out by the back door and rushed through the house and out back to get those too. It all happened a little too quickly for me to see the obvious problems with the plan… I was still collecting Elias… like the icicles over there were not the cute tinkling kind, but the thick, woody, tree-branch like ones, and that there was not a great place to stand while hitting them.
Fast Forward 20 seconds and Isaac had been cracked across the bridge of his nose by a huge, sturdy chunk of ice! It immediately began swelling up, and there was a small cut there too, and Isaac was air-raid-siren screaming. Oh… crap…
So I got the Thomas-themed boo-boo-buddy (a nice silky train containing an ice pack) and tried to examine the damage. Was it actually broken? It was hard to tell right off how serious it was. I called Ben and left a worried message, and began to fumble around for the number to the nurse on call. Ben himself broke his nose when he was four, and part of what was on my mind was that his nose has been screwed up ever since and still to this day creates a nuisance for him. So I was thinking that if it was broken we should get it reset, or something, so as to not have the same outcome.
But after real-sobbing for a good 20 minutes, Isaac started to shift into fake-sobbing. An hour later he was climbing me and running laps per usual. The nurse, who didn't call back for hours, said that they wouldn't want to see him for a week anyway, so that the swelling could come down enough to assess the internal damage if any. But his behavior leads me to think he's fine.
He looks pretty tough though. It's still a little swollen today. On the way to school this morning, he said that he would come in and say, "I have something to share for show and tell: my nose!"