Laurie Has a Pig on her Head (and Rebecca has a Bump on her Head)

I took the kids to the Laurie Berkner concert this afternoon, leaving Joel home get some more last minute studying in for tomorrow's board exam.

It was almost an incident-free excursion. The almost occurred shortly after we had arrived (early) and found our seats. There I was, congratulating myself on having found the concert venue with no problems and all of that, and Rebecca had to go and ruin it for me. Our seats were in the balcony section. Since we had like 20 minutes to go until showtime, I was letting Rebecca walk back and forth instead of making her be in her seat or on my lap. It's kind of hard to describe the layout but what happened was is that she was walking to a wall about four feet from me, then turning around and walking back to me. What I couldn't see from the angle I was sitting at was that there was a very small gap between the wall and the row of seats in front of us. So here I was thinking she was perfectly safe with nowhere she could hurt herself, and then she turned around, took a step backwards, and fell through the gap between the wall and the seat in front of her. So basically, down one concrete step, backwards, headfirst. (Can we say OUCH?)

I jumped out of my seat and over the row of seats in front of us and grabbed her, but of course she was crying hysterically. After a moment I saw that her lip was bleeding, and we had attracted all sorts of attention by this point and some ushers escorted us to the first aid station where a medic from CMC looked her over and gave me gauze pads and an ice pack for her lip. Rebecca was probably more upset over a strange man trying to put ice on her lip than she was of the actual pain she was in.

After we got back to our seats -- after having to file an incident report also -- Rebecca calmed down. I saw that in addition to her lip, she had bit her tongue when she fell so that had been bleeding too. She drank some ice water and put her head down on my shoulder.

As soon as the music started, she picked her head up off my shoulder and squirmed around in my lap to watch and clap and bop her head to the music. After a while her injuries were totally forgotten and she looked like she enjoyed the show even more than Ben did. I let her stand right in front of me, and she held onto the back of the chair in front of her and bopped and swayed and clapped through the whole show (which was an hour and a half long).

So that, by the time it was over, I had almost forgiven myself for making her miss her nap and almost subjecting her to traumatic brain injury.