At 6:00 last Friday, I rushed Ian off of his Game Cube game.
One more minute, Mom.
No. Now, Ian. We have to go.
We had to pick up Jonah from a birthday party. Slight sadness that Ian never gets invited to playdates or birthday parties. OK, sadness suppressed. Then we had to pick up Steve from the bus stop and then get the cardboard pizza from the local joint. Busy evening.
When we got to the party, the parents were waiting for the kids to get out of the stream where they were frog-huntin'. We traded some gossip, and I hollered at Jonah that it was time to go. He picked up his sneakers from the side of the stream and came running across the backyard barefoot. He tripped. Boys with big feet trip all the time. As he hopped back to the group of parents, the mother of the birthday kid squealed, "He's bleeding!"
He hobbled over to us and a small pool of blood stained the flagstone path. More squealing from the other mom. We bent over to look at the cut. He had sliced open the webbing between his toes. We hosed it down and I got a good look at the cut. He was going to need stitches. The other mom was completely flipping out by this point handing me bottles of water and screeching. I picked up Jonah and got him in the car with half a roll of paper towels wrapped around his foot. Ian followed us into the car quietly.
We drove into town and picked up Steve. We got the pizza and looked at Jonah's cut again. It was definitely time for the emergency room.
We walked into the emergency room with Steve in his shirt and tie and a pizza box. Everybody was starving, so we had a couple slices of pizza in the waiting room, while we were filling out the paperwork. I suppose we should have been too stressed out to eat pizza in a hospital waiting room, but we've done this so many times. In the past six years, we've been to the emergency room six times.
The doctor put four stitches between his toes and bandaged him up. As she was sewing Jonah, she said that in the summer time, she sews people up every day, because they get their hands mangled in lawn mowers. When their lawn mowers get jammed with a rock or a stick, they reach their hands in there to dislodge it. Then the lawn mower starts up again and whap. There goes a finger. Don't do that, people.
Jonah's fine. I drove him into school today. He will be a minor celebrity this morning at school. He'll get to take the elevator, which is reserved for kids with injuries. His injury isn't as good as the kid who broke his leg on the soccer field or the kid that broke his arm in the car accident. There isn't a cast to get signed. But he has a bootie and lots of gauze around his foot, so he'll get a pile of attention and jealous glares as he gets a ride on the elevator.
Apt. 11d 
That sounds like a good kid injury (though too bad that scar, if there is one, will be hard to show, or will encourage him to take his shoes and socks off to show. It would be more fun to have it on the arm or something.) When we’d get cut, my mother, who is a nurse, often though we should get stitches. My father usually thought a bandage would be fine. Thankfully, my mother usually won. And, pizza in an emergency waiting room sounds perfectly fine, but if you have such things, I strongly recommend going to the doc-in-a-box for things like this- they are usually cheaper, do as good or better a job, have a shorter wait, and help the people who must go to the emergency room wait less time. I got stitches at the doc-in-a-box many times, so speak with some experience.
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Glad Jonah is fine, Laura.
I’m afraid I came from a family like Matt’s, where my Dad often won, and so we have an assortment of poorly healed scars in our family. Though when serious stuff happened–as they often did around the farm and woods–off to the hospital we would go for stitches. I got a couple of beauties on my leg and head from such encounters.
Our youngest, Kristen, had to go get stitches at the emergency room last Thursday. We were watching a concert at a park; Kristen was running around and crashed head-first into a pole. Same freak-out amongst the onlookers as you described, though in their defense a bunch of blood on the face can make anyone panic. In the end, only three stitches; no biggie at all.
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Eldest Raggirl came home yesterday from a camping trip, and upon inspection we pulled a big tick off of her back. I assume this happens regularly without incident, but we’re still going to be pretty worried for a while.
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I disagree that there aren’t more voices now.
Are you arguing that there waa past when a larger group of bloggers had a larger audience (i.e. 1000 bloggers, each with 100 readers, while now, there are 10 blogs with a 99,000 readers, and 990 blogs with about 10 readers a piece, or something like that)?
Or, alternatively, are you arguing that there was a past when the 10 blogs with the 99,000 changed from time to time?
Or, more alternatively that it was possible for the 990 to move into the 10, but that doesn’t happen anymore? If the last, I accept Ragtime’s “new” argument. There is, for many things, a short period of time where the newcomer can move to the big time, just by being first. Eventually, you have to be better, and it’s always hard to be better.
Oh, and why do I still think there are more voices? Because there still are bloggers with audiences of 10 who are willing to blog, and I find and read those. I can see that without the hope of reaching the big time, those voices might disappear. But as long as soft incentives (being heard, working through your own ideas, . . . ) motivate people to write, there will still many be voices out there.
(I rarely read TPM, Yglesias, or HufPost. I read your blog regularly).
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Oops, sorry, I posted on the wrong thread.
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I’ll put your comment in the other post and then respond there.
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