Our Trip to the Children's Hospital

We had a scary incident the other night: Elliot tumbled off the couch and into the coffee table. The corner of the table cut into the side of his head, and he started to bleed.

The poor guy is always doing bodily harm to himself in one form or another, so I wasn't that concerned at first. But there was a lot of blood, and when Kelly called the doctor for advice, it was recommended that we take him in.

We went to Children's Hospital of Oakland, where a nurse and two doctors checked him out. They weren't overly concerned with his head wound, which didn't require stitches. But they asked about some of his other injuries. I looked over and realized that in addition to the latest problem, he had two large bruises on his forehead (from the aforementioned "ouch reports"), a bloodied eye from when he slid head first into gravel, and some random scratches. He looked like a performer from a toddler production of "Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark."

Then the doctors went away for a while...a VERY long while.

It seemed pretty obvious they were arranging to remove him from our custody.

I looked at Elliot. Well, buddy, we had a good run — two and a half wonderful years. I hope they're good to you. Do you think they'll let us keep Alice?

As it turns out, they were only gone that long because hospitals are slow and bureaucratic. Hooray.

They came back and gave Elliot a juice box (which didn't seem entirely appropriate considering it was almost 11 at night), then sent us home.