Believe in the Flowers.

Carol of the Zombie Jesus!

My mother has a lazy susan in her house, in a side cabinet at floor-level. It's actually two shelves, with the lazy susan on the top shelf, and on this lazy susan - and the shelf below - there are many fascinating things that are totally inappropriate for a baby to play with. Seasonings (including chili powder, can't you imagine THAT hospital visit?), cooking sprays, glass bottles of all shapes and sizes, rather heavy canned goods, and a menagerie of other things that a one-year-old probably shouldn't be allowed to play with. Of course, this is a moot point, considering he's sitting in front of that cabinet right now, pulling things out and stacking them on the floor. Stacking things is a relatively new concept; he has seen us do it with his blocks and Legos, but has never actually attempted the feat himself. He's usually content to just watch us throw around his toys so he has the opportunity to knock them over again, our beloved little Godzilla. So he's stacking cans, miniature jars of off-brand baby food used for making homemade dog treats, empty decorative bottles of olive oil, and empty glass salt and pepper shakers. Naturally, he only usually succeeds in getting these Towers of Hell about two objects high, at which point he gives up temporarily and seeks refuge in pulling the protective caps off of the spray-tops of bottles of cooking spray. I really, really like the concept of olive oil-flavored cooking spray, but I don't like the idea of an olive oil-flavored baby. I don't think we have a roast pan big enough for him anymore.

I could just take these things away from him and close the door again, although there's no real way to baby-proof that particular cabinet. There's just one fatal flaw with this plan: doing so would make him scream. Today hasn't been a particularly bad day - or good, neutral really - but the idea of ruining the otherwise lovely mood of a content child has me edgy, so for now, I risk temporary blindness. Well, HIS temporary blindness. This has nothing to do with MY well-being.

On Sunday, our goober touched the stove. Let me be more specific: for the first time, he decided out of nowhere that it would be a REALLY GOOD IDEA to reach up and just kind of put a couple of fingers on that hot pan up there. Yeah, that one, with the food in it and the burner on underneath. It's funny how you can turn your back for all of three point four seconds, and during those few seconds a child can go from being across the room irritating your spouse to trying to singe off a couple layers of skin. This has never been a problem before, and I guess we weren't really ready for it, because afterwards, since neither of us actually saw him make physical contact with the pan, we kissed him and hugged him and told him it was okay, and then wondered for the next ten minutes why he was still flinging around his left hand and screaming for what seemed like no good reason. Does this make us bad parents? Probably, but I don't see anybody revoking my license - OH WAIT NOBODY GAVE ME ONE. That's the problem.

So we took him to the emergency room about two hours later, after stuffing him with lunch and breakfast simultaneously because let's face it, we knew we'd be there a good three or four hours, and that meant no lunch for Gabe. We got baths, cleaned up, and almost made it out the door just over two hours after he had originally touched the pan. He had big red blisters on the pads of both the index and middle fingers of his left hand, and it pissed him off, naturally. We got there, waited a while in the ER, then got to go to something called "urgent care," which really means "we figure whatever you've got isn't going to kill you in the next day or so, so you can sit here and wait extra-long in an eight-by six room with no magazines or cell phone service and a bunch of things your kid can't touch so you'll be forced to listen to him scream during your hour and a half wait." So we sat. And waited. Why? So a nurse could come in right out of 1982 (well, his hair did, at least) and ask us what's wrong, so we could tell him exactly what we told the nurses up front, and then twenty minutes later a doctor could come in and tell us yeah, he burned his fingers, here's some cream you can put on that, but I'm too busy to do it so a nurse is going to come in after me to do all of the actual work, and oh yeah, she'll bring you the cream too. After being assaulted by three more nurses in fairly rapid succession, we escaped with our lives. Barely.

His fingers are looking better, now, and he isn't acting as though his fingers are causing him any real pain anymore. Which I suppose is progress, considering what could have gone wrong if he had maybe touched that pan a millisecond longer than what he did.

On the plus side, it turns out he's about 32" long and weighs 24 lbs 6 oz, so that's not bad at all, right?

Also, we've been doing so much work here at Mom's that we're not getting anything done in the places it needs to be done: say, for instance, the new apartment.

My paragraphs are getting shorter. I should stop.

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