The Chaos Continues

Remember how I wrote that my husband left for training on Saturday morning and by Saturday afternoon it was chaos?

Well.

It gets better.

Or maybe better is a bad word.

What happened was this: I went upstairs to fold laundry. I set Natalie’s leftover lunch on the couch in hopes that she’d eat more of it. That’s probably not a good thing to allow food in the living room but you have to understand, Natalie eats like a bird. She pecks at everything and then announces that she’s full. I do not make her sit at the table and finish everything because I’ve read articles and seen news clips that say if you do this, your kids might get fat and have an unhealthy relationship with food.

I put on Peppa Pig for Natalie to watch so she wouldn’t follow me upstairs and “help” me fold laundry. Her version of helping is to bundle everything in a ball and then jump on it.

When I came back downstairs I saw red everything. Red on the floors. (Including the expensive base housing carpet that they’ll charge you 1000 for without blinking an eye. Even though we both know that the carpet is not WORTH 1000, they know they can get away with it because if not, they’ll run crying to your husband’s commander and then trouble can brew. It’s ridiculous. It’s one reason why living in base housing is the pits.)

“What…what…” I began. I saw a smear of red down the wall.

It was like I stepped foot into a horror film.

Or a Real Housewife fight.

“MOMMY!” Natalie wailed. She was in the middle of the floor, gripping her foot.

And that’s when I realized that the red—that I at first thought was ketchup from her lunch—was blood.

I hadn’t even been upstairs for fifteen minutes.

Natalie, my longtime readers might know, tends to get hurt a lot. This is because she explores everything and thinks she can do anything.

The following has happened to Natalie:

--she got a cyst on the inside of her leg. This meant we had to stay in the hospital because she got a bad infection from it.

--she got a bad gash in her side that required that glue stuff to close.

--she got a hole in her head because she was running so fast and clipped the side of the stairway. She had to get two staples in her head.

--she fell flat on her face right before preschool. Her entire face was black and blue for a week. She basically looked like Rocky at the very end of all his movies.

There’s probably more. It seems like she’s injured at least once per week.

I immediately thought we’d have to go to ER, which is sort of like our second home. Natalie’s file is pretty thick.

“HELP ME!” Natalie wailed.

I got down closer and realized the cut wasn’t deep at all. The only reason why blood was everywhere was because Natalie started racing around the room in a panic. I rubbed Neosporin on the wound and slapped a band-aid over it.

“No ER?” Natalie asked, which is pretty sad that a five-year-old knows what that place is.

“No ER,” I confirmed. “Now we have to clean up,” I sighed. I did not expect to be scrubbing up blood so soon after my husband left. As I washed the blood off while on my hands and knees, I felt like a R-rated version of Cinderella.

How did Natalie cut her foot? Well, she dragged in her scooter from the backyard and somehow nicked her (bare) foot on it. I explained that scooters are outdoor toys and she was like, “But it was COLD outside and I LOVE IT SO MUCH!”

So yeah. That was my Saturday.