The Young and the Restless

We've earned a new badge

I think moms need a hypothetical boy scout sash to display all of our hard earned badges of motherhood. There's the usual ones...getting kids to sleep through the night, potty training, managing to hold back tears while dropping your first born off at kindergarten (it still counts even if you cry like a baby the second you get into the car. and even if you circle around the school like a creeper hoping to sneak a peek at them during recess. not that I ever did that).  Then there are the extra credit badges...cleaning up public displays of vomiting or diarrhea, damage control after they comment on the weight or skin color of a stranger or having to return an item your child has shoplifted from a store, you know, the usuals. We've all been there and we've all worked hard to earn our badges. But their are two badges I've been missing: the self haircut and the urgent care visit.  I've been quite happy without those two, but I feel like they're a right of passage of motherhood and I can't quite earn my hypothetical Eagle scout award without them. But unfortunately last week after 11yrs and 4 kids we earned our first urgent care badge.  We really have lucked out majorly in this department, mostly just earaches and croup, but nothing that would make us rush to urgent care (okay, and a few elbows popped out of joint, but we're pretty good at popping them back in ourselves). Poor Jayden fell off the monkey bars at school and broke his arm.  When I went to pick him up I could tell he was in a lot of pain, it's so hard seeing your baby like that. Just breaks your heart in two. I had no idea where to go or what to do and I wasn't sure how the whole socialized medicine thing worked, but was grateful for the principal and office staff who steered me in the right direction.  Three hours in a waiting room with Ryder was about as fun as child birth, but we finally got it x-rayed and in a temporary cast and Jayden couldn't wait to to go to school the next day and let all the girls sign it.  He basked in the limelight and milked it for all it was worth to the point that he milked the cow completely dry.  But a few days later after getting what he wanted out of it, he was ready to be done (you can't tell from the picture, but it goes all the way up to his shoulder because he broke it right above his elbow. Lots of itching and lots of mom bathing him and getting him dressed). Poor kid, he has been such a trooper and I'm so proud of him but it's going to be a loooong 5 weeks.  Man, how I wish we would have earned that self haircut badge instead.