Happy Mothers' Day.
The problem with my favorite snappy one-liner after doing something clumsy, "Nothing hurt but my ego," is that you can't use it when you've actually injured yourself. Even if you want to communicate the same light-hearted embarrassment.
I twisted (sprained?) my ankle on Friday. I was coming home from visiting friends, and had been waiting at the wrong corner for the bus because the 18 out that way does three different loop thingies, and though I generally can decipher pretty complex public transit schedules, I seem to have terribly bad luck with figuring out which bus is going where at this end of this line (or I'm right but they're always so off schedule that the one I see is the one before or after the one I was expecting).
Anyway, I was hurrying down the main road, trying to see if I might meet it when it connected back in after its loop. I had Nadia in the frame backpack on my back and my regular backpack with my laptop and other stuff on my front. So when I landed wrong stepping off a curb and my ankle went out, as it's wont to do, the moment and weight and shifted center of gravity took me down. Of course I was most concerned about Nadia, so I landed heavily on my knees and arms trying to keep her upright.
She didn't notice a thing. She wasn't even momentarily nonplussed. From her perspective she took a mild ride, much less dramatic than being played with by playful parents who like to turn her upside down and toss her in the air. Then we went back a few steps, she got out of the backpack, Mommy sat down on the sidewalk, and various new people came over to say hi and bring Mommy ice and bottles of water and let her play with their keys (hooray for concerned citizens), and Dan and Alyra showed up on a bike for a while and Alyra had a cool helmet on, and then she got to sit in the shade of a tree, watch traffic and the dogs in the windows of the pet grooming place and eat raisins and play with a water bottle until
yip95 came to get us. She had a blast.
Having experienced how limited I am in wrangling her for the rest of this weekend, I realize looking back how lucky I was that she was content to basically hang out in my lap for an hour and half and not decide to scoot off or demand to take a stroll. If we needed a ride sooner we could have called in people from farther away or just taken people without car seats up on their offers. But as it was, it worked out just fine. I was in a much better mood about it then than I am now.
I am having to face the fact that this is an ongoing pattern. I have a trick ankle. Every couple months it "goes out" and I stumble and the people I'm with ask me if I'm OK and I say yes and it's true. And approximately once every two years since college some circumstances add to it to make it more than a stumble and I sit around with it up for a while, icing, using ace bandages, getting piggy back rides, not using a cane when I should and generally being a royal bitch. I learned the hard way to actually slow down and take care of myself when I'm sick, but somehow I still have all that futile railing against fate when it comes to a twisted ankle.
I probably need to wear shoes with ankle support more. Or something.
Thing is, this time my opposite arm (the one with which I would use a cane if I were using a cane right) also hurts, as does the same knee, and my neck. Argh. Chiropractor on Friday. I have felt singularly useless this weekend, and therefore also sort of anti-social. Not actually opposed to socializing, but not good at it, if that makes sense. Like being forced to be physically passive turns off other centers of my brain. And we were in Massachusetts for a Beltane celebration yesterday where I could have used some social skills. (It was, by the way, still quite a nice day.)
It doesn't help anything that Nadia is cutting a new tooth and has come down with a cold, which last night involved a croupy cough (yay sitting in a steamy bathroom at 3 am!), and has been royally clingy as a result. (If you were expecting to see us today and didn't, it's because of the sick kid.)
OK. That's my whine. I try to avoid whining here too much.
I twisted (sprained?) my ankle on Friday. I was coming home from visiting friends, and had been waiting at the wrong corner for the bus because the 18 out that way does three different loop thingies, and though I generally can decipher pretty complex public transit schedules, I seem to have terribly bad luck with figuring out which bus is going where at this end of this line (or I'm right but they're always so off schedule that the one I see is the one before or after the one I was expecting).
Anyway, I was hurrying down the main road, trying to see if I might meet it when it connected back in after its loop. I had Nadia in the frame backpack on my back and my regular backpack with my laptop and other stuff on my front. So when I landed wrong stepping off a curb and my ankle went out, as it's wont to do, the moment and weight and shifted center of gravity took me down. Of course I was most concerned about Nadia, so I landed heavily on my knees and arms trying to keep her upright.
She didn't notice a thing. She wasn't even momentarily nonplussed. From her perspective she took a mild ride, much less dramatic than being played with by playful parents who like to turn her upside down and toss her in the air. Then we went back a few steps, she got out of the backpack, Mommy sat down on the sidewalk, and various new people came over to say hi and bring Mommy ice and bottles of water and let her play with their keys (hooray for concerned citizens), and Dan and Alyra showed up on a bike for a while and Alyra had a cool helmet on, and then she got to sit in the shade of a tree, watch traffic and the dogs in the windows of the pet grooming place and eat raisins and play with a water bottle until
yip95 came to get us. She had a blast.
Having experienced how limited I am in wrangling her for the rest of this weekend, I realize looking back how lucky I was that she was content to basically hang out in my lap for an hour and half and not decide to scoot off or demand to take a stroll. If we needed a ride sooner we could have called in people from farther away or just taken people without car seats up on their offers. But as it was, it worked out just fine. I was in a much better mood about it then than I am now.
I am having to face the fact that this is an ongoing pattern. I have a trick ankle. Every couple months it "goes out" and I stumble and the people I'm with ask me if I'm OK and I say yes and it's true. And approximately once every two years since college some circumstances add to it to make it more than a stumble and I sit around with it up for a while, icing, using ace bandages, getting piggy back rides, not using a cane when I should and generally being a royal bitch. I learned the hard way to actually slow down and take care of myself when I'm sick, but somehow I still have all that futile railing against fate when it comes to a twisted ankle.
I probably need to wear shoes with ankle support more. Or something.
Thing is, this time my opposite arm (the one with which I would use a cane if I were using a cane right) also hurts, as does the same knee, and my neck. Argh. Chiropractor on Friday. I have felt singularly useless this weekend, and therefore also sort of anti-social. Not actually opposed to socializing, but not good at it, if that makes sense. Like being forced to be physically passive turns off other centers of my brain. And we were in Massachusetts for a Beltane celebration yesterday where I could have used some social skills. (It was, by the way, still quite a nice day.)
It doesn't help anything that Nadia is cutting a new tooth and has come down with a cold, which last night involved a croupy cough (yay sitting in a steamy bathroom at 3 am!), and has been royally clingy as a result. (If you were expecting to see us today and didn't, it's because of the sick kid.)
OK. That's my whine. I try to avoid whining here too much.