Bloody hell

We'd finished eating dinner, I'd mixed up a cake and popped it into the oven, and I was sitting in the garage reading a book and enjoying a long-anticipated smoke when I heard the scream.

I jumped up and ran to the door, where I was met by Mikey, who was holding Britt, who was wailing hysterically and vomiting all over both of them, which wasn't that alarming in itself -- she always vomits when she cries hard. No, it was the blood. Lots and lots of it, all over both of them. Pouring out of her nose and mouth, all over the front of her clothes and his.

Britt likes to bang on pot lids with a wooden spoon, which is fine as long as somebody's watching her to make sure she doesn't jump up and run around with the spoon in her mouth. But jump and run she did, and Mikey didn't catch her in time and she fell on the spoon. He couldn't tell if it got her in the nose or in the mouth because her back was to him and she was bleeding from both places. Anyway, no more wooden spoons for Britt, ever.

We spent the first five minutes flipping smooth out and trying to figure out what happened. Within ten minutes we had everybody's bloody clothes stripped off and had wiped Britt down and saw that the bleeding had stopped. Within fifteen minutes she was sitting on Mikey's lap contentedly munching on her favorite treat -- crushed ice (she calls it "dice"), which I figured was ideal since cold constricts blood vessels. Within thirty minutes she was running around, laughing, playing and dancing.

We went back and forth over whether or not to take her to the emergency room, but the bleeding stopped pretty quickly and she calmed down before we did and I'd already put the bloody clothes in the washer and you know if you have to go to the emergency room and don't want to sit there and wait for six hours to be seen it's best to show up covered in blood, so we finally decided not to go.

I gently wiggled her nose to see if it was broken but it didn't hurt her. She wouldn't let us look in her mouth, though, so when she went to sleep a couple of hours later we examined her as best we could. Couldn't see any damage up her little nose and all her teeth were intact, so we used the handle of a baby spoon as a tongue depressor and couldn't see any damage to the roof of her mouth. Couldn't see the back of her throat, though, and that's most likely where the problem was.

I stayed up until 4:00 this morning keeping watch over her, making sure she was still breathing and there was no more bleeding. But she was and there wasn't, and today it's as if nothing happened. No bleeding, no bruises, nothing swollen. She ate grits for breakfast and macaroni and cheese and cake (she calls it "caack") for lunch, took her regular nap and now she's awake so I have to wrap this up quick.

Oh, God, there was so much blood.

(**shudder**)

I'm surprised I didn't wake up white-headed this morning.