Why Sarah Would Make A Terrible Monkey...

These...


are meant for these...

not these.

Well, my Sarah broke her arm this week, and let me say I'm predicting it's probably going to be the first of many such orthopedic mishaps for Sarah. She is definitely from my end of the gene pool, as clumsy as a bull in a china shop, as she well proved with her many attempts to achieve this break...

Her first fall was from the monkey bars at the park. Ryan says I should have known it was coming because apparently he has noted a pattern that she can only go three bars before falling, however I was not clued into her penchant for falling, and so I was sunscreening myself and looked up just in time to see my daughter's face making contact with the ground with an awful "thud". Gotta give the girl credit, though, she's a tough cookie. She cried a while and complained her arm hurt, but was soon up and using it to play and bearing weight on it, so we figured we got by with a close call.

Then came the 2nd mishap: while playing out back with Hannah, the two ran at the huge inflated sprinkler ball I had out for them and rolled over it. Like moss on a stone, Sarah clung to the outside of the ball and rolled forward into a handspring... right onto the wrist that was already hurt. But did I take her to the E.R.? No, because I'm thick and it takes me almost as long to catch on as it takes Sarah to break her arm good and well. Soooooo...

After about 24 more hours of fun and silliness with very little complaint from Sarah, while I was folding laundry upstairs, my dear ballerina was twirling with her sister and brother downstairs during that last-blast-of-daily-energy that is the witching-hour right before bed. Parents know this is when their kids have the most destructive and difficult to contain energy, and for Sarah, this led to a dizzying spin to the floor with a landing on, you guessed it, her right arm. So I finally caught on that, hmmm, maybe she might need to have her arm seen. I still never guessed it was really broken, though, until the doc showed me the x-ray and said, "and here's the fracture"... He must have thought I was a little coo-coo because I actually laughed out loud at that. It was more at the surprise and irritation at myself for not checking it earlier that I laughed, but doc must have been wondering a bit, because here I am with this adorable little pixie who just happens to have a black eye (from whacking her head against Hannah's on another occasion), a missing tooth (lost by natural causes, I assure you), and now a broken arm, and here I am laughing at the poor dear's misfortune.

Nevertheless, Sarah is adjusting to her newly-casted limb well, and no one has called CPS on me yet, so I think we'll make it past this incident. She shocked us when she picked red for the color of her cast (Sarah is famous for wanting everything to be blue... I even get confused when she and Hannah occasionally swap shirts and wear different colors because my brain is now hardwired to call whoever is in blue "Sarah"), but then she explained that she wanted red so that it would show better when people signed and drew pictures on her cast. We were blessedly able to obtain permission for a waterproof cast, and I'm so glad, because she has been loving the water this summer and making progress with swim lessons. And now, to look on the bright side, she has a lovely red hammer attached to her arm with which to crack nuts, crush her brother, or hammer nails if she should wish to do so.