what a day!

When your 2-year old has 3 stitches on her cheek, you tend to give her anything she wants. Which is why Emma had cheese puffs for breakfast.

And not the organic pirate booty kind … the “stain your fingers and mouth orange” kind.

It all started Saturday when we took Emma to my parents’ house in Georgia for her very first overnight away from us. We weren’t worried at all, because we knew Bo and Pappa would take good care of her … but we did miss her terribly.

Mom updated her Facebook a couple of times, and Emma was doing great. Went to sleep without any issues, slept through the night, woke up around 7am, just like she normally does here.

Then I get the phone call from mom on Sunday morning :: “Now don’t freak out, but …”

Their boston terrier Lizzie had scratched Emma’s face. An accident. They were able to stop the bleeding quickly, but the location of it was on her cheek – right where her smile curve is. So it was open.

They took her to their local EMT, and he suggested taking her to an urgent care facility to have it checked out. The main concern was scarring and infection. During this time, I approved everything we needed to approve over the phone and started getting ready to drive down there.

By the time we arrived, she was at the urgent care center getting treated. The nurse there was able to get it closed with Dermabond, and we thought everything was okay.

I updated Facebook and Twitter with a couple of pictures, and that was that.

Until about 7pm that night, when I noticed that it was a little red. I got her under the lamp and was upset to find that the dermabond had come undone, and she was bleeding again.

I immediately called her pediatrician’s office to have the on-call nurse paged. She told me to take her to the ER right away. We packed some snacks and books in a bag and started heading over to the children’s ER. On the way, I called the pediatrician again to make sure that we couldn’t just butterfly it closed overnight and bring her to the ped office the next morning.

I know, that sounds kind of irrational, but we knew at this point some healing at already started occurring, so would a few hours matter? Also, we didn’t want to take her to a germ-ridden hospital when she’s not sick.

The second nurse called her doctor who confirmed that she needed to go to the ER and have a doctor there stitch it immediately. They even told us that a plastic surgeon would probably do it since it was on her face.

Also, since the wound had been open, closed with dermabond and then opened again, they were concerned about infection, which could make everything about a thousand times worse.

We got to the ER around her normal bedtime, so I was thinking that it was not going to be a pretty few hours. Amazingly enough, Emma was in amazing spirits – singing for everyone in the waiting room, talking our ears off, making jokes, and generally being what you would NOT expect a 2-year old to be from 8pm to 12am.

Fortunately, they had a sick waiting room and a well waiting room, so we weren’t stuck in a room with a bunch of swine flu victims. Rather, we were in a room with a kid who had a broken rib. Not bad.

Even the sticker chart that I am sure we will be billed an exorbitant amount for kept her interest for about 30 minutes once we got back to a room, which normally doesn’t happen. She can’t do anything more than a few minutes at a time.

But even then, taking your kid to an ER is just not fun. Period. By the time we left, I think we sanitized our hands about 128 times.

We finally got in to see a doctor around 10:30pm, and sure enough, she said she’d have to stitch it. A huge glob of numbing cream, 30 minutes of waiting for it to take effect, two shots of lidocaine, and three stitches later, we were finally discharged at 11:38pm.

Emma was amazing. I know people say that about their kids all the time, but she really was unbelievable. She cried once when they gave her the shots of lidocaine (believe me, I was watching, and it was hurting ME!) – but she did not flinch, did not move a muscle while the doctor was putting the stitches in. The med student who was holding Emma’s head was just playing with her hair – she was THAT still.

The plastic surgeon oversaw the whole procedure and said it looked good when it was all over. They told us that there’s no way of knowing if she’ll end up with a scar or not, but if she does, it’s something that can easily be taken care of in the future.

We could not be more proud of our amazing little trooper.

After it was all over, Emma just wanted to go back to Bo and Pappa’s house, so clearly, she is not traumatized in any way. She is doing just fine.

I’ll go ahead and put the pictures of her stitches behind a cut, because while they’re not gross per se, I don’t think it’s ever easy to see a 2-year old with stitches in her cheek.

This morning, she played like nothing had ever happened, and she doesn’t even notice the bandaid covering her stitches.

In the end, we’re just thankful it wasn’t worse, and we’re proud of our strong little warrior. She’s an example to us.