A Bloggy Sort of Gift; a Mother's Big Mistake Redeemed, Maybe

Finslippy, Remains of the Day and Some Pig are my gifts to you, all six of you regular readers. You deserve it. Of course they all write so clearly and humorously, I may never see your IP address 'round here again.

Between Finslippy, Remains of the Day and Some Pig, my Mommy Blog jones gets fixed, I get some great laughs, an education in not sweating the small stuff and some incisive school-based situational humor. I cannot read enough of any of them.

*******

Speaking of Mommy Blogs, when something exciting happens, I occasionally indulge in a little mommyblogging myself. Something exciting happened this weekend, two things actually, one horrible, one wonderful, strangely related. The following post started out as a comment on Some Pig's blog wherein she regrets that her children don't get enough green vegetables. My point to her was that failing to feed children meals of less than perfect nutrition pales next to, say, nearly running over your child.

This past Friday, Eli, newly 8, and I were headed to town after a sick, though apparently not that sick, day home. He had been rediscovering the joy of the Smurfs and Jetsons for too long when he wandered out the door to push the mower (non-motorized)for a bit, making a swath of hay as he went. When I came out I hollered that he needed to bring the mower back up the hill since, a. were were leaving and it looked like rain, and b. our house already looks enough like little Appalachia.

He walked down to get it and I went into the garage to get the car. He must have had the wings of Mercury to get up the hill in the time it took me to s l o w l y roll my aging VW Jetta out. All I know is when I turned my head to see if Eli was back, he was right there, in the window. He had pulled the mower up the hill backwards and suddenly he was in the driveway with his left rubber boot under my right rear tire.

All I could see out the back seat passenger side window was his blond head and turquoise shirt inexplicably close. I'm guessing he was pulling the mower up backwards, hit the car with his back or bottom, spun around and stepped just behind the tire as I was backing out. He hadn't said anything at that point and I could not understand why he wasn't moving out of the way.

Here's the nightmarish part. I don't know what I did next, whether I took my foot off the clutch and continued backing up, thinking I was in first, or whether I pushed the clutch in to change gears. In either case the car went back about another two inches. It felt like a quarter-mile to me, and I'm sure to Eli too, because at that point he sat on the ground. Somehow he communicated, just before he sat down that I should go forward, and that I had not actually driven completely over his foot. So I did. (Manage to go forward, that is.) Quickly. So that my front wheel drive car spat gravel at my beloved little accident victim.

Eli was screaming and he was obviously in pain, terrified, betrayed, surprised and horrified, but through all that I could hear his angry scream, not his sick, or traumatized scream, and I knew that though we had had a terribly close call, Eli was going to be fine.

We got his boot off and his foot looked a little red. His ankle had gotten skun up where he fell, but he could wiggle his toes and flex his foot. Since Eli was insisting, maybe partly because likes to tell a good story and he was hoping for x-rays, we went to the ER. I have had my share of foot and ankle injuries and I wondered if they would even elect to x-ray him. The lovely P.A., Frank, did not think x-rays were in order.

After an hour and a half of exposing ourselves to the worst germs in Lincoln County, we left, Eli handily operating the wheel chair with a cool ace bandage around his ankle.

Saturday, he revisited the t.v. for most of the day and cheerfully hopped around the house when I had failed to deliver a desired item. Then he agreed to walk a few steps when I told him if he could walk at all we would go swimming.

Long fun swim later, he volunteered to take the Y's swim test, swam a length of the pool and treaded water for two minutes. He had been fretting about this test since Thursday when I told him we were switching pools, there were different rules at the new one, and he would have to pass a test. With the lovely lifeguard Emily's calm assurance, he passed with room to spare. I could not have been prouder of him if he had won an Olympic medal, and he beamed as if he had.

On the way home, he said, "It's like you didn't even run over me, Mom."