Scarlette and I went to the grocery store. She was dressed in her minion pajamas, with a large bandage wrapped around her foot. She showed her bandage to everyone that we passed. “See my new band-aid? It is SO BIG!” she told people.
“What happened to your foot?” the lady in the bakery asked her.
“Oh,” Scarlette responded seriously, “my Mommy killed it dead.”
That is not what happened to Scarlette’s foot.
What happened to Scarlette’s foot is that she insists on being barefoot all the time. Her therapist told me that it was a sensory thing for her, the way she wants to run feet bare across the concrete and the grass.
And across the front porch, which is sanded and smooth and our favorite place to play.
Except somehow earlier this week when she ran across it, a piece of wood broke off and lodged itself in her foot.
Not, like, a splinter. No. A very large shard of wood that embedded itself deep into her foot.
She screamed once, sharply, and then I told her not to move and she froze like a little flamingo as I picked her up and carried her inside to look it over.
I snapped a picture of it to send to my mother because I wasn’t sure that I could get it out on my own. On my first pass with the tweezers part of it broke off in her foot.
Then a tick fell off her shorts onto the floor.
Of course it did.
So she’s sitting on the counter with her foot in the sink and I said “Keep your foot right there and don’t move at all so I can kill this.”
Except that was maybe not my best choice of words because Scarlette had not seen said bug and so what happened was, she started screaming “NO MOMMY! DON’T KILL MY FOOT! DON’T KILL MY FOOT MOMMY! DON’T MAKE MY FOOT DEAD!”
She had actually been relatively calm up until that point.
And turns out, it wasn’t even a tick after all. It was just a random bug.
So that definitely wasn’t an overreaction at all on my part.
(After that, every time we put hydrogen peroxide on the wound Scarlette would yell “QUICK MOMMY HUG ME! HUG ME NOW TO MAKE IT BETTER!”)
Later that night I was explaining to my mother that we ended up having to cut away some dead skin to get to the worst of it out.
And Scarlette said to me “See. I told you dat you made my foot dead.”
After she was all butterfly bandaged up, she ran in the den and said “OKAY DADDY, ARE YOU READY TO PLAY SOCCER?!”
And then she kicked the soccer ball as hard as she could with her bandaged foot.
She is one resilient little kid.
And I, on the other hand, need, like, a week to recover. Preferably on a beach. With an adult beverage.
If you also need a pick me up this week, join me at the MomTrends Book Chat Twitter Party at 1pm ET! They’ll be giving away a $50 Amazon gift card along with 4 copies of my new book! RSVP here to be entered to win and then join us on twitter to chat at 1pm! I LOVE twitter parties – they are a ton of fun!
