Yes, it's gorgeous outside but I have to....

10:55 a.m. – Arrive at Dr.’s office for 11:00 a.m. appointment.

11:00 a.m. – Fill out paperwork for 10 minutes about my 7-year old son’s pain tolerance and smoking and drinking habits (How about separate paperwork for the kids – just an idea!)

12:10 p.m.. – Ask receptionist if I have time to run out and get lunch; told we are "next.” Right.

12:20 p.m. – Get escorted back to “cast room.” (My son doesn’t have a cast, just a sling.)

12:25 p.m. – Get escorted to X-ray where my son insists on posing like he is in a police lineup. The amused nurse lets him look at the x-ray and he promptly points out his elbow as the break in his arm. I don’t correct him.

12:30 p.m. – Dr.’s Resident comes in and asks my son some questions, makes him move his arm around, and flicks his fingers. Says he is going to go look at the x-ray and will be right back.

12:33 p.m. – Watch resident walk into another examining room where he remains for 7 minutes.

12:47 p.m. – Doctor comes in. Looks at x-ray (shows my son where the break really is) and says to leave the sling on for 3-4 more weeks. Can he ride the bus? No, not a good idea. I beg the doctor to put him in a cast. (Because the sling offers ZERO protection and he's a not-particularly-athletic 7-year-old boy who could slip or trip or goof his way into an even worse break and worrying about it is TOTALLY stressing me out and all the latest tests show that stress causes belly fat and that is the LAST thing I need.) Doctor informs me that the only cast for this kind of break is the State of Liberty cast then shows us a picture of a kid with a cast around his entire torso and up his arm that is straight up in the air.

12:53 p.m. – Still deciding if the humor derived from the Statue of Liberty cast will outweigh the inconvenience.

12:55 p.m. – No, it probably won’t.

1:10 p.m. – Hit the McDonald’s next door. See several other children from the waiting room. (Are they making us wait so long to drive up McD’s business? I would have taken him there anyway, I swear!)

More bad parenting

Shouldn’t broken limbs be more obvious? These stories rarely make me feel better about my own bad parenting decisions but ever since yesterday – when I dragged my son to an audition (me, not him) then dumped him at my husband’s office so I could go run music at skating team practice all the while not recognizing that he HAD A BROKEN ARM I have heard tale after tale of parents telling their kids to “suck it up” only to find out later that the kid had a broken arm or leg or something.

My memory may be hazy or inaccurate but it seems that when I was a kid it was fairly obvious when someone had a broken appendage. “Jimmy fell off the monkey bars and his arm was twisted around and completely facing in the wrong direction, so of course I ran him right to the hospital.” It seems that broken limbs used to dangle helplessly at askew angles so it was obvious that they needed to be fixed. These days everything looks normal except your kid (who just might be trying to get some attention) claims that “something hurts.”

You’d think I would be smarter; this is not the first time this has happened to me. Same child, same arm. When he was 3 he and his sister were waiting for her school bus and playing their usual game of push-the-sibling-off-the-rock-into-the-pile-of-leaves. He came in crying and didn’t stop for a while but eventually calmed down, though he wouldn’t move the arm. I dragged the poor kid to a grocery store two towns away so I could buy dry ice for the 4th grade Halloween party before I realized that every time something even brushed his arm he turned deathly pale and looked like he was going to throw up. He ended up in a cast from shoulder to fingertips.

And yesterday, well, he let me gently squeeze the arm all the way up. I figured there was no WAY it could be broken; it was probably just very badly bruised. So I dumped him at his dad’s office and he walked around saying hi to everyone with his right arm bent and clutched against his torso.

Six hours later he came home from the hospital looking like this.

And I felt like this.