Pieces of Eight

What was that sign of aging? Fading memory or something? Sheesh. I was so carried away yesterday talking about how great my husband is that I forgot to mention one of the major things we dealt with.

So it goes like this. I had been lying down a bit after getting ill from the pain, sometime after I'd fed the kids lunch and tried to get them to take naps. The Man (TM) had picked up the groceries and a fresh lot of meds for me, so that was good, but the meds weren't working, and I was just shaking. He came in from making these nacho-sopapilla hybrids in the deep fryer, shook his tongs and me, and ordered me to go to bed. Lovely man.

So, anyway, I was lying down. Took a little nap, apparently. The youngest pirate also took a nap, and people were kind of wandering in and out of my room every so often, so I was only slightly startled when TM came in, holding little Blackbeard. But then he got me back for this episode, which happened one year ago tonight. He said, "I hate to bother you, but his finger is turning purple--"

I didn't hear the rest. I sat bolt upright, muscles twanging and eyes wide open. "What's going on?" My punkin pirate had apparently stuck his middle finger through a wooden piece of a number puzzle while playing after he woke up from his nap. That thing was stuck solid. Again, my husband asked what I thought we should do next. "Ice," I suggested, handing him an ice pack while rummaging in the fridge for some butter and trying not to curse audibly.

The ice didn't work, and it made the punkin so angry that any benefit was quickly lost. Butter was also out of the question, and by this time, that tiny finger was looking really scary. Running to the garage to search for our smallest saw, I mentally calculated how long it would take to drive to the emergency room, and whether the local urgent care clinic (much cheaper) would be likely to have the equipment to cut the offending object off of my baby.

I hadn't even finished this line of thought when TM was on the phone to our wonderful neighbors. "Got a Swiss Army knife or something with a small sawblade?" he asked. "We'll see what we can do," was the response, and within a minute and a half (though it seemed like an eternity in Purgatory), the neighbor was at the door with an armload of tools that might be made to do the job.

The first tool or two didn't do much, so it was time to go for the power drill. Punkin was highly dubious but fortunately has the male gene that makes tools abundantly fascinating. The first side wasn't too bad, and we were able to break through the puzzle piece most of the way. The other side was a bit trickier, with several big hands holding the five little fingers away from the drill and several big people trying to calm one small one, who was by this time pretty upset.

Captain Kid (still very ill), lay on the couch and watched the proceedings languidly. Finally, the offending object was off, and I could breathe again. And so could the punkin's finger. The neighbor accepted our sincere gratitude and left the wooden bits with the punkin pirate, who got out his crayons and began tracing them contentedly. I'm not sure I've ever felt such relief.

Except possibly this morning when, after waking up every hour or so to cry pathetically because he was so miserable, Captain Kid was able to sit up and eat some toast for breakfast. I gave him some Tylenol Infant's Drops because it was all the children's medicine we had, and an hour or so later, his fever had disappeared. Hallelujah.

After all that, today was not as hard as I'd thought it would be. Whew.