Sunshine of the Eternal Shiner

So last Sunday (1/4/09), we're out having brunch with Mollie. A hipster place down in Northside called Honey. Very hip crowd. VERY good brunch. Colin is the only child in the joint. He's mostly well behaved, but toward the end he got a bit restless and decided to start running about the joint. I got up from my crab cakes Benedict to sort of supervise - you know, keep him out of the wait staff's way, keep anything breakable from breaking, etc. The door is wooden with a large pane of glass in the middle, and a bar mechanism that operates the lock. He thought the bar is teh kewlest thing evar, and decided to start running from our table to the door and operating the mechanism. All's well, right? Nothing broken, Mommy and Mollie enjoying a grown-up conversation about .....whatever it is skirts talk about, hipsters smiling at the precocious child laughing and running about.

And then it all went horribly wrong. In a hurry. On what became his last wind sprint toward the door, the boy trips on the carpet and does a full-on faceplant into the wooden base of the door. The sound of his noggin hitting that door was like the sound made when a melon smacks on pavement from a precarious drop. AWFUL. As soon as he hits, everyone in the joint says, "OOOOH!" at the same time. The boy is stunned initially, but then, understandably, begins the crying. I pick him up and in the span of time it took me to walk from the door to the table, he's got a goose egg that's grown to the size of a jumbo egg.

To the restaurant's credit, everyone snaps to - we've got a bag of ice and the bill paid inside of 90 seconds and we're off to the nearest (or so we thought) hospital. Suffice to say, Mollie doesn't know where Children's hospital is. At all. By the time we were ready to pass the second hospital on our odyssey, the goose egg has grown to a full-on mongoloid brow. So we pulled into Christ hospital. And we can't find the emergency room. Took us a good 15 minutes to find the place. We finally find the check-in desk, get checked in and wait. And wait. And waitandwaitandwaitandwaitandwaitandwaitandwait. THREE HOURS. By this time, Jr's forgotten about the second head / bruise growing out of his melon, and is bored stiff with the lack of toys in the room. So we decide to leave. ENOUGH! Naturally, at the time that we're out the door, the doctor shows up. Looks him over for 2 minutes, declares the boy is fit as a fiddle and we're free to go.

So I had to take pictures, right? These don't do any justice to the size of this thing. It keeps spreading each day - now it's down around his left eye.
These are day of the incident.

Incident Day + 2 (Tuesday evening):

That's a grape in his mouth in these pictures.

Incident Day + 3 (Wednesday evening):
So, we've learned that the boy has a hard head, and can take a fall. Good to know. Despite the horror described above, he really is tip-top now. Aside from the ugliness of the bruise, you'd never know that anything ever happened.

SO, that was the first trip to the ER of '09.