Day: December 8, 2006

I’d been occupied in my office for quite a while when I became aware of all the quietness upstairs. The house is pretty quiet when the older three are at school, but usually I can hear Patches clunking or thumping or playing some kind of a game. I went to find out what the total silence meant. I found Patches very carefully cutting up an old flyer sent home from the school. Cutting is an activity I generally try to supervise because kids often get …creative… when left alone with a pair of scissors. In this case no damage was done, so I calmly stepped forward to Patches to ask what he was doing.

“I’m cutting words.” He informed me. I saw that he had indeed carefully cut a strip of words from the page. I then noticed that he was further rendering the strip of words into individual letters. This flier was in a 12 point font and Patches was carefully rendering the entire half page into individual letters. He had already accumulated quite a little pile.
“Are those your words?” I asked pointing to the pile.
“Yeah. It’s a pile for the alphabet song.”

This kid amazes me. He’s three and a half. Where did he get that much patience and persistence?

Howard and I were curled up watching a TV episode before bed when I heard thumping upstairs. I went to investigate and found Patches in the hall with blood all over his face. He was half asleep, confused, and alarmed at the red smears all over his hands. He was vigorously upset with our efforts to clean him off. Then further upset at any suggestion we had to make. It was only when we proved that the bleeding had stopped that he began to relax some.

It is hard to be logical at midnight. Logic is especially hard to come by when you’re holding your blood coated child who is shrieking in uncharacteristic ways. Mostly I was just managing the problem and reassuring Patches, but part of my brain was busily at work providing the direst possible causes for Patches’ nosebleed. Trying to create sinister connections between a sole spontaneous nosebleed and a couple of allergy attacks from other family members was convoluted at best.

Fortunately Patches reassured me by being his normal self once he was calm and demonstrably not bleeding anymore. He snuggled in my lap and watched the online trailers for Meet The Robinsons and Happy Feet. Then he snuggled closer as I tucked him into our bed to go back to sleep. He was out again within minutes.

I hope this nosebleed is a fluke rather than the beginning of a pattern.