Paging Dr. Ross

So, tonight, we reached another milestone in our journey as parents -- our first ER trip with one of the kids. It was Owen, with an especially bleedy cut to his lip. And, since I'm writing about it now and trying to be a little flip, you know it all turned out OK.

We had friends over for supper and while the boys manned the grill, the rest of us were in the kitchen. Then I hear Steph exclaim to Owen, what happened!, and when I turn around there's blood dripping down his chin and all over his hand. We go into triage mode with paper towels while trying to ascertain what happened. But the sharpest object in the vicinity is a tortilla chip, and Owen claims to have no idea how it happened. No matter, right now we're concentrating on his cut.

Well, the blood keeps coming, and after several towel changes, adding an ice compress and having him lay down on the couch, it's about 20 minutes later and this thing is NOT STOPPING -- barely even slowing down. So decide to head to the ER to see if he needs stitches.

It's only takes us about 10 minutes to get there (our proximity to the hospital always made me feel secure during my pregnancies) and the bleeding still isn't slowing down. We check in and the nurse asks to see the cut. Still bleeding. We walk over to the registration desk, where a different nurse asks to see the cut. So I remove the towels..and it has stopped bleeding. Seriously. In the 1 minute and 5 feet between the two desks, it has stopped completely. So completely, in fact, that we can't even SEE the cut. If I didn't have a handful of bloody paper towels, we'd just be the crazy parents standing in the ER with their kid who's obviously right as rain.

We end up having the triage nurse take a peek at it, and she informs us that they don't usually do stitches on a lip anyway because the cuts bleed a lot but close up very quickly on their own. If only we'd known that 30 minutes ago! So, when we get our ER bill, we'll see how much we'll be paying for that little nugget of knowledge.

And, as a post script, we did determine what caused this cut and launched this whole adventure. It was a baby spoon...with a little jagged edge. Yup, the most innocuous utensil around landed us in the ER. Sheesh.