A coin, a cast, and a few contractions

     Growing up in a house full of boys who kept my mom on a first-name basis with the ER staff, I always assumed that you had to have a Y chromosome to cause that much trouble. 

Not so.

The Richardson women at our house have been stirring up our fair share this week.

Wednesday: The Coin

     Mindy (Troy’s cousin) invited us to go swimming at her grandma’s condo pool, and we gladly accepted.  I’d been having contractions all day and couldn’t wait to get in the water and get some gravity relief. 
     After a relaxing swim, we buckled in the car and were heading out when Aliyah coughed a couple times in her car seat.  She was making a funny face, and asked me for a drink of water.  I passed her the water bottle and asked if she was ok.  “Yeah,” she said, “I just swallowed my money.”

“What??!!”

     She had apparently found a coin at the pool and thought she would hold it in her mouth.  Gross.  I tried to help her identify what size coin it was, but could only get her to say that it was like a quarter, but not.  Great.  Looked like me and my contractions were going to the Instacare. 
     Fortunately Troy got home about then and took over the dirty work.  Even better when he called a few hours later to report that Aliyah had swallowed something that appeared to be a 50 cent piece, or at least measured as large as one.  The doctors at the instacare and Primaries were baffled that she even swallowed in the first place.  That’s my girl, always going above and beyond. 
     They sent Troy and our little “piggie bank” home with stool softeners, a poop-sifting bowl, and orders for another x-ray if she didn’t “pass” the coin in 5 days. Fun, fun, for everyone.

Thursday: The Cast

     The next day was my dad’s birthday, and we all headed over to the park for a picnic birthday dinner.  We ate, laughed about Aliyah’s new “savings” plan and were just about to head home for some pie when…… CRASH! Aliyah fell off the gymnastics bars at the playground, landing right on the tippy tip of her elbow. 

Our Piggie Bank now had a crack in it.

     So back to the instacare, where everyone still remembered our names, back to radiology, and finally back home, with a newly splinted arm, to be casted after the weekend, assuming she didn’t need surgery (which thankfully, she didn’t).


Friday: A few (more) contractions
     The library sounds like a calm enough place to take your kids at the end of a long, rather horrible week, right?  Really, it would have been, except that I went into labor.  False Labor, as it later turned out, but intense, every-five-minute-contraction labor nonetheless. 
     Now it was my turn to get to visit the very special back room at the Library, to get carted off to the hospital, and then get carted back home again bawling like a baby because my contractions stopped and “Couldn’t anything have gone right this week??”
     Luckily, many a weary frustration can be easily mended by a good, long nap.  So I had me one of those, let my mother-in-law fix me dinner, and put on my big girl panties for whatever is coming our way next week.