Why I tell my kids to LEAVE EACH OTHER ALONE

*Warning--if you don't like medical pictures, you might not want to look at the photos herein*

I see (and hear) beautiful stories of siblings (gasp!) getting along and playing together so well.  I have friends' blogs that I read and her children are virtually perfect.  WHY then are MINE at each others' throats 24/7 (or so it seems)?  Don't get me wrong, they have their moments, but more often than not, they are driving me up a wall with their bickering.

(yes, I have a point, bear with me).  We had a FUN weekend around our house!  I had big plans to update you all on Monday with a weekend recap and great pictures of our fun!  We've got more fun coming up tomorrow too (the secret's not out yet, so I'm not telling).......

Sunday afternoon, the boys were outside playing in the waterhose in one of their rare "getting along" moments.  They came inside to dry off and get a snack when all of a sudden, screams abound.  Apparently, they were playing and Nolan turned around right into Carter's finger.  Carter's finger poked Nolan smack dab in the eye and cut it.  Yes.  Cut. The. Eye.  As in--blood.....oh my.

We have some paramedic friends who took a look at his eye and said "definitely get him to the ER".  So--off we go.  We have one of the BEST hospitals in the country here in our "backyard" so that's where I took him.

Looking straight on, it doesn't look bad, but if he looks to the side, you can see all of it.

After seeing 3 doctors, the consensus was that he had (has) a BAD cut in his inner eye, which did NOT penetrate the iris (the colored part).  This was good news!

He was looking happy here, but that was before all the doctors were in and out!  Here, they are getting ready to clean out Nolan's eye with some saline (or numb it--I can't remember if they numbed and then cleaned or cleaned and then numbed).

This was definitely when they were trying to clean out his eye.

 

After they cleaned out his eye, they prepped it for a blacklight view.  They put some sort of orange-glo liquid in it with a needle-looking stick and then we could turn out the lights and see how bad the cut really was.

Inserting the orange-glo....

After looking at the eye through the blacklight, we saw that the cut was pretty bad.  At this point, they knew it had not hit his iris or done significant damage, but were mostly worried about infection.  They cleaned his eye out (again)......

And we waved goodbye to the ER after getting a prescription for antibiotic eye drops!

Monday afternoon, we had to take Nolan to a Pediatric eye specialist to see how extensive the damage really was--she was an AMAZING doctor!  Just loved her!  (ironically, she has a little boy herself and was hesitant to have any more.  I definitely told her to think twice).

The BEST news was that even though she was still very worried about infection, she said his retina did NOT get detached!

Can I tell you how nice and quiet it was at my house on Monday afternoon as my boys played separately???  : )

~CB~