Camp Injury

I attended Young Women camp every year growing up and loved most of it. Every year the weeks leading up to camp would involve camp prep activities. Sometimes we learned about dutch oven cooking, or practiced three or four different ways to make a fire. And sometimes we would put on dramatic skits about how to built a splint out of tree branches for one of our fellow young women who broke her leg on a hike. Awful things always happened on the hikes in our skits. Girls would start on fire and have to stop drop and roll, snakes would bite us, we'd get terrible lacerations and have to tie them off with tourniquets. The camp manual has 13 pages of first aid information and up until last week I had never needed it. Dun dun dun. Do I have your attention now?

I was having so much fun last Wednesday at camp, this time in the role of a leader. We'd just completed a treasure hunt using compasses and were off to shoot pellet guns. After a few minutes of demonstration by the instructors, we were free to shoot at targets for 15 to 20 minutes. After a few adjustments, I was hitting the targets across the river bed every time.

pellet gun ready to load

pellet gun, ready to shoot

Don't tell anyone, but if you've read my blog, you know about my Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman fetish, and I may have let myself imagine I was in Colorado Springs protecting my family on the frontier. Load, cock the gun, shoot. Repeat. I was really getting into it.

I think I had two pellets left, and after loading the second to last one, I jammed the gun closed.On that piece of skin between your thumb and index finger. And blood started pumping out instantly. My first thought was, Oh shoot, where do we tie the tourniquet? One of our cute Mia Maids led me back to camp and as I wandered back through the camp I wondered if I was going to end up in a clinic that night with stitches.

The camp director pulled up a chair and turned my head so I wouldn't get woozy. A husband of one of the camp directors went to work cleaning my bloodied hand and assessing the damage. "I couldn't do blood six months ago, I do blood now," he said. I was so touched by what that meant. He had a horrendous bout with MRSA last fall that almost took his life and in the aftermath required him and his family to clean large wounds and grafted skin on his leg on a daily basis. I felt like it was a privilege to be under his care. He decided stitches were debatable, but if I kept it wrapped and didn't move it the wound should be able to close on its own. I stayed a few more hours. I had come up for the day and needed to go home that night so one of the Laurel advisors took me home in my stick shift (OUCH).

See me not looking at it ? I didn't look at it at all night. When I did look at it the next afternoon I had to lie down. Gashes in the skin just aren't my thing.

thanks to Jazmyn who was ready with a camera

I was grateful to all the people who stepped in to help me that day, and grateful too that I spent a good amount of time up at camp. We had so much fun and you get to know people on a different level in settings like that. 

It was very sore and I wasn't able to do things like my hair for a few days, but the human body is amazing and five days later it's completely closed up. 

So I didn't wrap it myself, and neither did a Beehive, but when it all came down to it, I was left with my very own camp injury that was worthy to be displayed in the camp manual. Truth be told, I'm proud of it. :)

For small cuts and scratches, clean
the wound by washing it with soap
and water. At home, use plenty of
water right out of the faucet. On a hike
or in camp, use water from your canteen
or a clear stream. Let the wound
dry; then apply an adhesive bandage.
For larger cuts, wash the wound
with lots of soap and water. Let it dry;
then keep dirt out of the wound by
covering it with a sterile gauze pad.
Hold the gauze in place with adhesive
tape or with a triangular bandage,
bandanna, or scarf folded into a cravat
bandage (see p. 43). If you don’t have
a gauze pad, fold a clean piece of cloth
into a pad.

Mr. & Mrs. Vargas

nieces waiting for Cynthia & Jose

with my sisters-in-law

And then we danced. My family was also there and it was fun to have them experience a Latino wedding with us. Danilo let them know he wanted to see them on the dance floor, and they did NOT disappoint (although I was most amused by my dad who danced for the first time in my life, and must have been so taken aback that I didn't record it). And watch that last clip of Danilo dancing with my mom and tell me I'm not the luckiest girl in the world.

We were so happy to be a part of Cynthia and Jose's special day. It was wonderful from beginning to end.



Note: This post is also known as I Get My 2nd Brother-In-Law. Please watch for my 3rd brother-in-law coming this September.

Neighborhood Walkabout

There is a lot I love about our neighborhood. One thing I really love is the neighborhood walkabout that happens the first Sunday of every month in the summer. Five homes host everyone with a treat of some kind in their yard, and everyone comes out of their homes and just mingles together. It just feels good. You find out who lives where and what they do for a living and what you have in common, and you really get to like your neighbors after something like that. We hosted tonight, we went through over 70 ice cream cones and at least a dozen cups after that. I put one of the teenage boys in the neighborhood in charge of photographing the event.

A Sad Story

One week ago we brought home some Annabelle hydrangea bushes from the nursery. They really, truly looked like this. They were gorgeous. Our plan was to have some mulch delivered the following day and go to work planting. Knowing we had a wedding in a couple of days, I decided to postpone the planting one week.

About three days ago, all the beautiful blossoms started to wilt and the leaves too and got worse day after day. It made me ill to look at them. It makes me sad and embarrassed that something so gorgeous went so downhill under my care.

We got them in the ground as promised yesterday, mulch and Miracle-Gro and all, and I am literally praying for them. I have shed tears over these hydrangeas (Danilo's just happy it's not over something he did :). I have heard that plants in distress will do better if you lop off their blossoms so the energy can go to saving the plant. The man at the nursery said over the phone he agreed and that he's fairly confident I can bring them back. So I chopped off all the once-popcorn-ball-sized-now-wilting-near-dead blossoms with a pair of scissors and I'm reporting it here so you can hopefully share in my joy when they bloom again.

OUCH

(There are four of them total.)


Thanks for listening.

On a happier note, look at our lovely lawn!! I am so proud of Danilo!

Introducing My First Ever Brother-In-Law

... and his darling new wife. Jordan and I go WAY back. There's this Primary song about the baptism of Jesus that tells how he was baptized "in the river Jordan's flow." I remember learning the song in church one Sunday and not grasping the larger picture, but imagining a bunch of Jordan Pearts flowing in a river. We grew up in the same neighborhood til we moved when I was 13, but we still attended the same jr. high and high schools. While we never ate lunch at the same table or ran around with the same crowd, I always remember respecting him from a distance. He seemed like the kind of guy who didn't need to experiment with some of the garbage those stages of life can offer. He seemed to have it together.

He had Chelsea from day one. Their wedding day was among one of the sweetest days of my life. Days like that are the very substance of life because of moments like this

and all the quiet ones happening in your heart reassuring you that these people and these times are what matter the very most.

Grandmas and Grandpas

I have had lunch in the homes of both sets of my grandparents in the past week. I feel it's such a blessing to still have all of them here with me. I was so fortunate to have a very happy childhood and their homes and their presence was very much a part of that. It's fun for me not to just tell Danilo and Grace what my grandparents were like, they are sitting right next to me experiencing it too.

With my Grandma Parke on her 70th birthday

 Yesterday we were at my Grandma and Grandpa Achter's to hike the trail to a waterfall you can access about an hour from their backyard. For the first time in my life my 82 year old grandpa said he'd love to go but didn't think his health would allow it that day. Instead, he hiked with us about nine or ten minutes to drop us off at the main trail. With a twinkle in his eye my grandpa told us to enjoy our youth while we still have bounce in our step. I say he said it with a twinkle in his eye because there was not a hint of regret in his voice. Really what he was saying was, I encourage you to enjoy life to the extent that I have.

After we returned from the waterfall, we had the kind of lunch that is characteristic to my grandparents' house... carrot and raisin salad, potato salad, tuna fish and celery sandwiches, and pumpkin cookies for dessert. The kind of lunch that used to make me sigh inside and wonder, where's the macaroni and cheese? Now that my taste buds and I have grown up, it's the kind of lunch that I love because of the way it takes me back to my childhood in one bite. I forgot the brown cow. I don't know if anyone else calls root beer and milk poured in the same glass a brown cow, but my grandpa always has.

When I turned out the light last night, I thought about the couple hours spent at my grandparents' home and thought, I think that was important. I wanted to remember it.

Going up to the waterfall with my Grandpa Achter, Memorial Day 2007

I know I am fortunate and that sometimes other factors come into play, but I'm thankful for the way both my mom's and my dad's parents have taken good care of themselves so that my new little family has been able to enjoy them too.

I would really love to thank the police officer who may have altered the course of my husband's life a couple of decades ago

Danilo's mom told me this story a few Sundays ago. It's a little gem. Just when I thought I knew all there was to know about Danilo Collado. 

I'll do my best, a few things always get lost in translation, but as I understood it, when Danilo was 13 and living in Miami, he decided he was going to join a gang. The boys who were going to let him join told him he had to steal something from the store. 

Petrified, Danilo went in and grabbed the easiest thing he could find, a little Hot Wheels car. He'd caught a clerk's eye who followed him out the door and apprehended him. I'm not sure when the officer arrived on the scene, but this was the critical part. The officer had the opportunity to give Danilo a mild talking to and send him on his way. What difference would it make to haul this kid to the police station? Would it be worth the time and effort?

It made a huge difference.

The officer measured an appropriate amount of justice on my husband. He did take him to the police station. He probably received a good talking to. He instructed Danilo to call his mom and ask her to come get him.

Danilo started to cry. His mom was pregnant. She worked hard, and they didn't have a lot of money. This was going to make her sad. The thought was painful to Danilo.

My mother-in-law said she didn't stay long at the station once she arrived to pick up her son. She said there was an understanding between her and the officer that her having to come down and pick him up and knowing it would disappoint her was punishment enough. 

He didn't get into the gang. And he never tried again. It's a cute story, but I shudder to think where Danilo could be today if the officer had let him get away with it with no more than a slap on the hand.  If the 13-year-old son of a soon to be single mom living in Miami had ended up joining the gang, or even just learned that illegal activity only equals a slap on the hand.

Would his future have turned out the same? I can't say for sure. I decided awhile ago not to worry about what-ifs. Because this is what we have, and I'm so thankful.