Calvin relaxes (as much as one can relax in a body cast)

Bean bag chair, a little t.v.... not too terrible.  The strange shape of his chest in the photo is the top of the cast.

(Gramma Jean, he's been calling the Bob the Builder pillow case his "comfort" pillow.)

Strange days of fall

Guys in Ties.

Moments before...

Off to school.

Yeah, this was taken a few weeks back. We are not marching around the backyard in our underwear anymore. Bit too nippy for that. 

Dear Reader (or perhaps it is readers since Scott is often checking this blog for my infrequent entries and also our parents skim it),

I seldom post this year because Mark Zuckerberg uses some sort of long-distance crowd hypnosis to make me post on Facebook all the time. The most I can do in the old fashioned blog world is sometimes write here and "share a link" on my Facebook page, which feels weirdly self-aggrandizing, like I live in a tiny and self-referential world. Which I do.

You might already know that Calvin broke his leg rather horribly this weekend. Although I have heart-wrenching photos of  his cast covering his broken leg, with its spiral fractured femur, part of the other leg, and his torso to the mid-chest, I would rather post these earlier photos. The one of the kids in the leaves is literally just minutes before he fell off his scooter. It's the place Scott and I still feel that we left our minds and hearts only a moment ago. 

The intervening days have been a kind of hallucination, starting with a bewildering night of E.R. trips with a trembly, frightened child, an ambulance ride with a then-doped-up kid and hard crying (Calvin, me, Scott) and telling doctor after nurse after doctor after nurse how he fell and what we did and asking for more morphine for him, and valium, and wishing very hard that our legs could be broken in some way that would make Calvin's leg unbroken. And then-- modern miracles-- by late morning the next day the leg was set and it was already a whole lot better for him. Weird, and wicked uncomfortable, but better. (First words post anesthesia: "This is stupid!")

Calvin is going to spend six weeks healing and recovering in his cast, and has some physical therapy ahead. All things considered, this was- to borrow a word from my friend Gretchen, a Craptastic few days of seeing Calvin suffer and hurt. And it has also been days of feeling all our blessings, knowing that Calvin is one of a minority of children in the world with access to medical care and pain management for his injuries. Children break bones every day and cannot get so much as an aspirin. And here is Calvin, already mending, already getting used to a funny but now (to him) normal routine. Friends and strangers are being nice to us and taking care of us. We live in immeasurable luck and kindness.

The other thing I want to tell you is that the clip-on tie was Calvin's own idea, and after he put it on, he went back upstairs to get Scott a tie, so that Scott could "pretend" to look like him. And that Audrey is a natural at home health care. Soon as we got him home, she pulled up a chair next to his bed and started doing flashcards.

"We are Princess Rosemary and John, the Spiderman"

Worrying things the kids say when I've stepped out of the room, but am within earshot:

1. Sorry, Mom!
2. It wasn't me!
3. Nothing just happened in here!
4. Mommy? I really, really, REALLY love you.