It must be raining...

Wednesday morning began much like any other day... I had just fed Graham and was still trying to screw my eyes shut against the increasing daylight outside. Troy was getting ready to hop in the shower, I was thinking about what needed to get done around the house and whether or not we would need to go run errands. Then we heard a 'thump' from Gabriel's room, which was shortly followed by a shrill little scream. When Troy ran in there, Gabriel was sitting on the floor and crying. Troy picked him up, soothed him, and set him on the sofa so he could get his shower before work. I came in with Graham and we all spent a little 'down time' just relaxing on the sofa. Then I got up to get breakfast ready, and when I called Gabriel, I noticed that he was crawling to his table. I thought he was being goofy - since Graham just recently started crawling, maybe he was imitating his brother - and set him in his chair. While he was eating, I was getting dressed when I turned around and Gabriel had joined me in my room. He was playing quietly on the floor until it was time to leave. I helped him to his feet and that's when I realized what had happened. He couldn't take a step on his right foot, rather he tried to, and fell down. He had been crawling all morning because he knew he couldn't walk on his foot and he was compensating. He just never said anything to me. I called his pediatrician who got him in in about an hour and sent him for x-rays. Try giving a 2 1/2 yr. old an x-ray. It is not pleasant. They could hear him fighting and screaming out in the lobby! After the x-ray the doctor called us and said that she couldn't tell if there was an injury to his ankle or not, except that there was an effusion (read: fluid in his ankle) which was obscuring the image. I'm thinking that all the kicking and fighting that was going on during the x-ray probably didn't help the image, either! We decided to take him to a pediatric orthopaedic surgeon who felt his little leg and ankle and promptly said "This is fractured." 30 minutes later Gabriel and I were headed to the car sporting his brand new cast.

He's handling it like a trooper, though. Any thoughts that a cast might slow him down were way off. If anything, he has a new weapon in his arsenal - a 10 pound foot! After he woke up from his nap on Wednesday he looked at me and said "OK, I take off this cast now." We explained to him that the cast has to stay on for quite awhile, until his bones are all healed up. Then he stubbed the toe of his other foot, and said "I need a cast!" When we went to the grocery store the other night, he kept mispronouncing the word and was telling everyone in the store "I have gas!" So I was very loudly explaining that his CAST was going to make his leg better, and wasn't his CAST a pretty shade of red?