Grey Area

"cheese cutter" or "the earring that saved my son's toe"

my son Jackson (he's almost 3 months old) crapped out of his pants this morning. mustard everywhere. so i take him into his room to change him, and while carefully removing the diaper and his clothing, he urinates right onto his face. nice.

so we decide to give him a bath to clean him up. while bathing him, Rita sees some of her hair entwined in his toes, and tries to remove them. while pulling the hair out, a couple of them form a slip knot and strangle one of his toes a bit. so there is this very fine ring of hair indented into his toe with the potential of cutting off his circulation. it looked like one of those wire cheese cutters. his toe was getting more and more bright red.

Rita freaks out a bit and yells for me to bring her the tweezers to remove the hair. the hair is on so tightly that she can't get the tweezers underneath them. so now it's panic time.

we get out the door and are going to the local kaiser clinic. they won't pick up the phone due to the high volume of calls. of course. meanwhile Leighton is due to be picked up from preschool any minute. we decide to go get Leighton first and then go to the clinic, hoping we don't have to drive to the urgent care in fontana.

while we are getting Leighton, i decide i'm going to try to rip the hair off. it breaks at the knot but leaves the strangling hair still wrapped around the toe even tighter now. DAMMIT.

one of Rita's friends who also has her son in preschool says to try an earring to get it off. OF COURSE! it's not too sharp to puncture Jackson, but its small enough to hopefully fit under the hair. i had to dig a little (Jackson got a little pissed about that) and once i hooked it, i ripped it off. the hair broke and all was fine. it only took a little walk to get him to calm down. now Rita is paranoid about hairs around his digits.

a day in my life as a father.

posted by Evan @ 4:26 PM