I Got Blood

I wiped out on the prairie path this past Sunday afternoon.  I, of course, blame the kids - they were being entirely too quiet in the Burley I was pulling behind behind me on my bike.  I was curious with a hint of worry.  Why were they being so quiet?  Leading theories were a) that they were both reading their books, b) that one or both had fallen asleep or c) that one had quietly strangled the other with the loose harness strap that I can't use because, together, they're just too big for the Burley.  So I had to check.

Hindsight told me that there was a better time to look back.  We were mid-way through an incline (the up kind), and I just didn't have the speed to hold my front wheel straight and maintain my balance should it turn even slightly.  I looked back, saw Ella sleeping, her head resting on an awake Cal's shoulder.  Awww... so sweet.  Strangulation... whatever!

And then I turned back to continue looking forward to finish my climb.  My tire was turned right at the time, so I tried to correct it and turned it back too far left.  At this point, a turtle may have been moving faster than I was; but I still had a chance to save myself from falling, so I turned it back right again... then left... then right... then WIPEOUT!

I first looked back to find the kids, eyes wide open, safe in the unturned Burley.  I then looked back beyond them to see if the people I had passed on the bridge a couple of minutes before had seen me fall -- they were just coming around a bend, so I figured they hadn't.  Whew.  I then looked down at my left leg, which was the one that had taken the brunt of the fall.  It was pretty scraped up.  Blood trickled down from my knee to my ankle.  This was a familiar "injury" to me given all of my years playing softball where one of my favorite plays was the pop-up slide into second and third.

Cal was the first to talk.  "Are you okay, Mommy?"

I quickly told him I was.

Ella chimed in, "Mommy, you made me bump my head and woke me up."  She was whiny.

Thanks for the sympathy, Ella.

Cal saw my bloodied knee and said, "If you bleed enough you'll die."  I amazes me how flippantly these kids throw around the notion or possibility of death.

"I'm not gonna die," I told him.  At least, not because of this injury.

"Mommy, you made me bump my head and woke me up," Ella said again.  She had absolutely no sympathy or concern for my well being.

By now my bike was upright and ready for me to get back on it... or so I thought.  So I did. And the first downward pedal zipped so fast I almost fell off again.  My chain had fallen off of the sprocket.

I turned down the help offered by a fellow bike rider who had reached us on the path.  Getting the chain back on its sprocket was an easy fix.

My bloodied knee (post-rinse)

We finished our ride by stopping at the park in our neighborhood.  It was empty.  The kids love it, and I just wanted to sit and be.  By now, my knee looked pretty excellent, bloody and dusty.  I poured water from my Thomas the Train water bottle on it, and it didn't do much to clean it. The blood that had trickled down to my ankle had hardened by now and needed to be scrubbed off.

When I got them out of the Burley, I told Ella, "Look, Ellie, I've got blood."  This is Ella's way of saying she or someone is bleeding... I have blood.

"Okay, as soon as someone comes to the park, we'll have to leave," I announced.

"Why?" the kids wondered.

"Because I don't want them to see my bloody knee," I told them.  Something about a kids' park being exposed to my bloody knee for any amount of time didn't seem right.  This set off a chain of more questions that I tried to answer without using the term "disease".  I don't want them to be afraid of blood, just careful around it.  I ended with, "blood has germs, so just don't touch anyone else's blood except for yours."

And then they both ran off into the play area where they proceeded to climb and run and slide and scale and laugh for the next 20 or so minutes while my bloodied knee and I rested on a nearby bench.