Not exactly what I asked for...

For Mother's Day this year, I wanted a nap. Really, that's what I was asking for. After church and lunch, I was going to convince the kids to take a big family nap before Aaron fixed some of his yummy stroganoff for dinner.

The day started off as planned. We went to church - we even got there on time, which always makes me happy. We have Relief Society/Priesthood/Primary time first. So I was in Relief Society and I was leading the closing song when I heard the door open behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sister Leavitt slip in and whisper something to the Relief Society president who was sitting behind me. Suddenly she jumped to her feet and started leading the music while whispering to me "Go! Go!"

Having no idea what was going on, I grabbed Brekken from where he was playing on the floor and left. In the hall, Sister Leavitt told me that Preston had been in nursery and somehow pinched his finger in the hinges of the door. So I'm thinking, okay, so he needs to be hugged and cuddled, no big deal. Until Sister Leavitt mentioned the "blood everywhere." Okay, maybe a bigger deal than I thought.

So we go into the ladies room where I can hear Preston howling and there is blood on the floor, the counter, the sink. All over his hands (and the formerly white sleeves of his shirt). It took me a minute to see where the injury was, because the blood was everywhere. Then I saw the middle finger of his right hand. It was smashed. I won't go into too much graphic detail, but it was nasty.

Sister Leavitt went to find Aaron (he had a pacifier in his pocket, plus Brekken was not happy to have been handed over to a stranger while I tended to Preston). I cleaned up Preston as best I could. With the help of a thick wad of paper towels and some pressure, the bleeding was slowing down. I wasn't sure if it was something that needed to go to the hospital or not. I was kind of leaning towards yes, but didn't want to overreact. There are two doctors in our ward - one of them Preston's pediatrician. Of course, neither of them was there yesterday to give us a quick opinion!

So we went home and treated it with ice and bandages. And then it bled through the first set of band-aids. So we took those off, did the paper towel wad, pressure, and elevation thing some more. It definitely slowed down, but we just couldn't get the bleeding to stop all the way. So after 4 hours of this, we dropped Haley & Brekken at Melissa's house (thank you, Melissa!) and headed off to the ER with Preston.

We spent over 4 hours in the ER at Children's Hospital. The final diagnosis was a broken finger. The nail had broken, too, which cut his finger and nailbed all the way across the top (thus the bleeding). So he had to have the nail removed, got two stitches, and then his finger was splinted and buddy-taped to another finger. It was very traumatic for everyone involved.

We picked up the other kids and then spend another hour or more trying to find a 24-hour pharmacy to fill Preston's prescriptions. I believe it was around 9:00 that we finally got everyone some dinner. Haley and Brekken at least had eaten at Melissa's, but Preston had only had a few bites of peanut butter sandwich since breakfast, and Aaron and I hadn't even managed to eat breakfast that morning, let alone anything since. We finally got everyone to bed around midnight... causing me to oversleep and miss the bus this morning. And I'm sure Aaron will have a great time trying to get Haley out of bed for preschool this morning, too.

*sigh* The positive side is that the finger will be okay. He has to wear the splint for a few weeks and the finger will look kind of gross for a couple of months until the nail grows back, but eventually all will be back to normal. And somehow he managed to catch only one finger in the door instead of several. That would have been much worse. It was definitely a Mother's Day to remember!