Summer Reruns

Ok, this rerun is for my Texas friends who asked me to blog about it so they could hear the whole story...Although I wrote it last October, it's my account of Halloween in '06.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Halloween Mishap

I've been thinking about Halloween since August (or maybe since last Halloween) and had costumes planned out and fabric purchased before the month was over. And of course I spent yesterday frantically trying to finish them up before Spencer had to go back to work today after three weeks of paternity leave. All three boys now have costumes ready to win prizes at the ward Halloween party next week.

As I was sitting at the sewing machine, I kept thinking about last year's Halloween mishap. I'm sure some of you have heard this story, but I've never recorded it for my own records...and it's a doosy!

It was the day of our ward Halloween party, and I was in large part in charge of it. I had to be at the church in the early afternoon to start setting up and wouldn't have time to get back home to get ready. So when I fixed my hair that morning, I just fixed it for my costume. I was going as Lucille Ball...a costume repeat, I know, but no one out here has ever seen that costume and it was a good one. I show it off every opportunity possible. I was especially excited because I hadn't had an opportunity to leave the house in a costume since college. I was excited to show off my kids costumes as well. I sat down to the machine to make a few adjustments to my costume (I hadn't worn it since before I had kids and nothing fits the same after).

While sitting at the machine and ignoring my children, I see Reid (9 months old) coughing up blood. I should have warned you this would be graphic. Don't worry, that's as gross as it gets. Then I look to Parker who I now notice, a few moments too late, that he has my pin cushion and is dispersing pins around the room. Although I hadn't seen it happen, I just knew Reid had swallowed a pin. He was notorious for putting things in his mouth that don't belong there. To make matters worse, we only have one car and Spencer had it that day. So I had to get a friend to drive me to the ER.

After a series of x-rays, they finally found the pin. It had punctured his throat and was lodged there. So after happily crawling around the ER and winning over everyone's hearts, all of a sudden everyone was afraid for him to move so it wouldn't puncture anything else and cause a more serious problem. I had to keep him still and happy...which is an oxymoron for a 9 month old who hadn't eaten or slept for about 7 hours at that point. We had to take a life-light ambulance (not a regular one...one for life threatening emergencies) over to the children's hospital. There they had to put him under and surgically remove the straight pin.

As a side story, when I met with the anesthesiologist, Reid had started to put something in his mouth again. I sarcastically said, you'd think he's have learned by now. She looked at me like I was a stupid parent and told me in all seriousness that he wouldn't be able to understand that at his age...Duh!

They got the pin out and Reid had to stay at the hospital over night. We missed the ward Halloween party and I still haven't left the house in a costume since college. With the ward Halloween party coming up next Friday and me still post-partum, I don't fit into any of my old trusty costumes. We'll see if I have time to work something up in the next week.

And now back to the start of my story...I had to have a friend come pick me up, wait in the ER, ride in an ambulance, meet with an anesthesiologist and a surgeon, and sit in the waiting room at the children's hospital, all while sporting a Lucille Ball hair do. If anything could be funny about that day, that was it.