Devilish Charm

This little man is full of charm.  Devilish charm.  And it's a good thing that he has it.

Today he stole a pair of Joe's scissors and cut one of Joe's brand new books.

Front cover and back.

Joe was fairly devastated as he treats his chapter books as if they are made of gold.  So Sam had to pay me the money to replace this book as well as apologize to Joe. 

Someone else in the house has been a bit distructive lately.

Lacey has decided that it is loads of fun to rip her dog bed to shreds.  Rolls of toilet paper can be substituted for a bed and shredded just as well.  Lucky for her, I understand why she does all this stuff. 
Plus Sam and Lacey are two of a kind...

A kookaburra has replaced the magpie as the resident bird of the deck.  For the first several visits, we'd all point, look, and comment.  It doesn't matter that kookaburras are quite common (and sometimes annoyingly loud) around here.

We've a very nice winter so far.  My parents enjoyed their visit, and we had good weather almost the entire time.  In fact, the weather for the whole winter has been much better than last year, less rain and warmer days.  The weather is supposed to get colder and wetter later this week though. 

In case you haven't heard...

Tom is back in a sling.  On Wednesday morning, all three boys were having a bit of a wrestle in the front yard.  I stuck my head out the door and cautioned them against such action, with a reminder to be careful.  Two minutes later, Tom starts screaming!  As soon as he came in the door, I had a feeling he'd rebroken his collarbone.  Well, actually, Joe jumped onto Tom's back while Tom was lying on the ground and that broke the collarbone.  An x-ray confirmed the break, right through the healing of the other break.  Tom gets to wear his sling for 6 weeks this time.  It means that his soccer season is over.  He's handling it all fairly well, but we still have 5 1/4 weeks to go. 
The kids will head back to school tomorrow.  They've been off for just over two weeks.  I am certainly ready for things to get back to normal a bit around here.
 

A boy and his collarbone

So I am way behind on my picture challenge and blogging.  I will catch up.  I promise. 
However, I have something to share first.
Every Wednesday night, we drive over to the soccer fields for practice.  This week is the first week that both boys have practice on the same night.  I was very happy about this as it means only one evening at the fields instead of two. 
Joe's practice starts at 4:30 and Tom's starts at 5.  Each one runs for 1 hour.  Just before 5 o'clock, Tom was playing with his teammates.  Basically, they were warming up before the coach arrived to start practice.  Sam was playing with a friend and I was talking with a friend as well.  I hear crying and turn around to see Tom shuffling towards me with his left arm hanging very limp at his side.  'Oh, no, this can't be good' was my first thought.  His crying was one of pain and not just a little pain.  He had fallen somehow, but no one saw what happened.  I start looking at this shoulder, thinking that maybe he'd dislocated it.  I notice a large bump on his collarbone that shouldn't be there.  'Oh, he's broken his collarbone,' I say.  I show it to my friend and she agrees that it's not quite right.  I gather Tom and Sam and load them in the car.  I then drive over to the next field and gather Joe up from his practice.  I text Jay since I know that he is riding his motorcycle home from work at that moment and let him know what's going on. 
The verdict is just as I suspected and it's a broken collarbone.  Our local little hospital doesn't have x-ray facilities so we had to wait until the next morning to confirm the nature of the break.

Wednesday evening was also a bit of a run around as the doctor wanted us to give Tom over the counter pain medicine and we had none in the house.  All the local pharmacies close at 5:30 most days.  I called one friend and she had some.  I drove to her house only to discover that all of her stuff had expired 6 months earlier.  We then called another friend and then drove to her house to get some. 

Thankfully, the medicine did help.  Tom hasn't had too much pain.  Here he is about 2 1/2 hours after his fall. 
On Thursday we bought a real sling, got the x-rays and visited our family doctor.  Our doctor says that the arm will heal fine, but it will have to be in the sling for about 4 weeks.  The ER doctor had told us something completely different, but she hadn't seen the x-ray.  No soccer, jumping, running around or anything for the next 4 weeks either.  He's being a real trooper about it now, but that may change as the time moves on a little bit.