Two butterfly stitches and a scab that looks like a spider growing out of his head...

We had a wonderful Christmas at my parents house in Amarillo. I still love going home for Christmas. The whole family is together again for a few days and I still feel a little bit like a kid when we go home. We have a few Christmas Eve traditions that I always look forward to. My mama makes clam chowder and cornbread for dinner, we go to the candlelight service at church and my dad reads the Christmas story from Luke before we open our presents around the Christmas tree.

This year was a little bit different. Christmas Eve was our first day at my parents house. Jake was loving it. They have a big living room that opens up onto a game room and he had plenty of room to run around. My niece Katie was entertaining him a lot. They played chase all over the place. Around about naptime we see Jake come flying into the living room, then we see him fall down, and then we hear him crying loudly. He tripped and hit his head on the fireplace. My sister got to him first and could see that his forehead was bleeding. I think I got there second and just saw a big open wound on his head. I kind of flipped out. I wanted to throw up. I was really thinking about what his high school graduation picture was going to look like with a big dent in the middle of his head.

Mike got to him next and picked him to have a look at the wound. He declared that Jake was going to need stitches. Great. I had just had Emma at the ER five nights before for six hours and didn't think I could handle another trip. So Mike and my brother in law Alan took Jake to the hospital.

Three hours and a six foot four inch male nurse with a ponytail holding Jake down later they came back home. My child looked like Ralph Macchio from the Karate Kid. He had this big white bandage wrapped across his forehead that had to stay there for an hour.




I felt so sorry for him. As soon as they came through the door I just held him. Then I told him he should just take it easy for awhile and rest. I put him down on the ground. He looked up at everyone and said "You can't catch me!" And he was off. Trying to get the boy not to run is like trying to get the wind not to blow. He is a force of nature. And he was born to run.

I'm happy to report that the boo boo doesn't seem to hurt him at all. The stitches are supposed to be absorbed into the body so we don't even have to go back to get them removed. I can't wait until that happens because right now he has threads sticking out of this huge scab and it just looks like a big spider crawling out of his head. Too bad this didn't happen at Halloween instead of on Christmas Eve!

Oh, and those Christmas Eve traditions? Well, we skipped the candlelight service due to the head trauma. We still got to hear the Christmas story being read from Luke with Jake's own version chimed right in over the voice of my dad. And we still had a Christmas tree although it was an actual Charlie Brown tree because my parents couldn't put up their real tree or their new cats would have destroyed it this year. And it was still one of the best Christmas's ever.