Ouch!

It was another fine summer's day here in our little neck of the woods. I was inside preparing dinner, Trouble happily playing with his new-to-him-via-Ebay GameBoy Advance. Mini-Me was outdoors playing with a couple of friends. Hubby had just stepped out to return a movie. The sky was blue, there was a light breeze - it was picture-perfect.

Then the clouds rolled in, literally and figuratively. The dog had warned me that there was someone at the door. I looked over my shoulder to see Mini-Me's little friend, Missy (But she's not my girlfriend, Mom! She's just a girl, who's a friend.), peering at me through the screen.

"What's up, Missy?"

"Mini-Me fell and now he's bleeding here and here and here and ..." as she points to various parts of her face and legs.

Lovely. Put dinner on hold, get Trouble into a pair of shoes and out the door we go. Mini-Me is sitting at the bottom of the neighbour's driveway, bawling for all he's worth. As I get closer, I can see the carnage. Oooh, that looks like it's gotta hurt. But I steel myself and put on my best "Oh, you're overreacting" mom face.

"What happened there, big guy?" I inquire in an upbeat tone.

Through gut-wrenching sobs, he manages to convey that they were playing some sort of chasing-the-bad-guys game. He was running, tripped and apparently tried to break his fall with his nose. He looked like Rocky Balboa before the all-important pep talk.

As I brought him inside to clean up his battle scars, I though Hmmm...it's been a while since we've had an accident. I guess we were just due. And then it dawned on me. School starts in less than two weeks. Just enough time for his wounds to scab over. Of course, that'll be followed shortly by school photos, right around the time when the scabs will have fallen off, leaving shiny new pink scars right in the middle of his face, where the camera's flash is sure to pick up the reflections quite nicely. Not that this is the first time he's sporting some sort of wound for a school photo. There's a picture on our wall from his second year in daycare, where he has a similar (although on a much smaller scale) scar across the bridge of his nose. It's almost become a tradition for our boys to record their mishaps for posterity.

Maybe for our Christmas card photos, he can give his brother a black eye. We must maintain our traditions, after all.

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