Full

Okay, I think everyone's had their fill of Bead Soup for now. The next round is this summer so check back for a new soup recipe then.

One last bit of housekeeping, though. I mentioned in my Soup post that I hadn't been able to come up with a name for my necklace and if anyone gave me a name I liked, they'd win a resin pendant. I'm happy to announce that I loved the name "Summer's Dawn" as submitted by Skylar of Brising Beads. Congratulations, Skylar! You win a resin pendant so drop me a line via e-mail and send me your snail address and I'll get that right out to you! Or, if anybody knows/chats with Skylar, be sure to let her know.

In other news, things have been crazy around here as usual. We did a trip to New Mexico in mid-February to get caught up with some of the family. Visited the old family farms in Las Cruces and Hatch and then made the 4 hour drive up to Albuquerque where, through really fantastic planning on our part, all of our family was out of town. Hey, I never said I was a travel agent. Weather was a little on the chilly side and we had rain one night, but no snow (darn it!). More details and pics from the trip later if I ever get my act together.

After we got home, we had a whole series of accidents/illnesses which I mentioned a bit in my Bead Soup post as almost preventing me from getting my pieces done. My back went out for several days so I was laying flat on an ice pack for quite a while. The kid and I both had colds for a week. But the scariest thing that happened was the call I got from his school one day telling me that I needed to drop everything, fly there as fast as I could and get him to the ER.

Why, you ask?

Well, let me tell you.

He and several other children were sent from their classroom into an area known as the "pod." It's sort of a central hub that several rooms connect to and is used as a storage/workroom for the teachers, houses their supplies and has several small tables with chairs where kids are occasionally sent to work alone or in groups for various reasons. Normally, there is a teacher or a parent volunteer in there.

On this day, unfortunately, there was no adult supervision. Ryan's group was sent into the area where the large paper cutter is (you can see where this is going, right?) They found the table they were supposed to use for their project covered with items so one child went back to the main room to tell the teacher about this. In the meantime, the other children discovered the paper cutter and one girl undid the latch on it (it's supposed to be a "safety latch", but it's incredibly easy to undo as I found out later). She began to lift up and drop the large, saw-like blade.

Ryan stuck his hand out and told her to stop...and she chopped off a chunk out of the tip of his middle right ring finger. And when I say "chunk", I mean the pad area of the fingertip almost down to the bone.

He was then sent, bleeding profusely, with only another child for an escort, all the way to the office.

Oh, and did I mention that it was POURING rain that day so my drive to the school and then to the ER was rather a bit of a nightmare?

Upon arrival at the ER, the doctor decided he could try to glue the piece of Ryan's finger back on using surgical glue. So, he didn't have to have stitches which was good news. It was also good news that the cut missed the nail so he didn't lose that AND it missed any vital nerve/tendon areas so they didn't have to call in the hand surgeon.

Of course, it was his dominant hand so homework and handwriting and certain other tasks were challenging for a while, but thank goodness everything seems to be healing well and it doesn't look like he'll have any noticeable scarring...he just won't have a fingerprint on that finger!

So, yeah, I've completed my quotient of excitement for the time being and am looking forward to things quieting down a bit and maybe even a nice, relaxing Spring Break vacation on our annual trip to the desert in a few weeks.

That's it for now.

KJ