My 6 year old thought it would be fun to jump on and off our bed. And now, this becomes an ‘In Plan’ or ‘Out Of Plan’ exercise in healthcare.
Yeah, jumping on the bed is wrong. Driving to an ER in a blizzard is also wrong. And pleading FMLA to a boss of less than a year kinda sucks, but being 6 and having to have surgery to insert pins into your arm to set it for 6 weeks while convincing you to hold back the kinetic energy of Spiderman kinda tops that in terms of suckiness.
Yes, you are ‘the coolest son in the house’. Yes, you have no fear. Yes, you will be courted by every girl with maturing ovaries w/i 3 grades of you. But, Jesus Christ Almighty! Must you piss away every dollar I set aside for college for you and your brother on your medical bills…?
Ouch! I hope he heals quickly, and remains injury free the rest of the year.
Now you have me wondering if I should try and stop our 5 year old son from jumping on our bed. So far, he only does it when I am there, usually still in bed. I even make him hold my hand if he gets really crazy. But some day he will want to sneak in there and jump on it himself, so I should probably not encourage it.
He isn’t the most active kid, however, so we have always been fine with any spurts of rambunctiousness he has around the house. So, unlike most parents who are sick of all the running and jumping, we are telling him to do more.
My jumping on the bed injury happened when I was four, my brother was 5. (he was the one with no fear) He also thought it would be fun to jump right next to me to make me bounce higher. He probably didn’t know that it would send me sideways, into the cedar chest, head first.
The scar on my adult head is about 2.5 inches. It must have been horrible looking on my 4 year old head.
One of my nephews broke both arms a week before his 7th birthday (“Hey, Dad! Look what I can do on the monkey bars!”) Now he and his brothers are into skateboarding.
Dweezil did something similar (broken arm / pins, though no bed-jumping was involved… he just fell funny on the playground) at age 4. We didn’t have FMLA or a blizzard involved either, but the whole experience is not one I’d be eager to repeat. He was a pretty miserable kid for a few days.
One good thing in our case: Dweezil was not yet potty trained (related to his autism)… so his broken arm didn’t get in the way of handling himself at the toilet.
Worst injury I had as a kid was when I scabbed my knee. Down to the bone :s
Was pulling a wheelie on my bmx and the front wheel fell off, went down and over the handle bars when the forks hit the pavement. Scar’s not massive these days, bout an inch squared.
One time i jumped off the roof of an easily 7 or 8 foot high out-house. Not even a scratch, just a bit winded from landing.
It’s weird how a small fall can do more damage than a higher fall, if the angle’s wrong
We were never allowed to jump on the beds. I thought my parents were just big party-poopers (they were), but now I know that there is a good reason, too!
I just talked to my mom. She told me my niece broke her foot. This niece is four years old, and in her lifetime has also broken an arm and collarbone. If I didn’t know my sister & her husband better, I’d wonder what the heck they do to that child.
Your “Spiderman” reminded me of a kiddy with a similar injury I cared for several years ago. He jumped off a roof, breaking an arm. It was just after the first Batman movie came out. He had tied a towel around his neck, intending to “fly” off the roof.
I sat with him and carefully explained that Batman was not real, and even if he was, Batman couldn’t fly. He agreed.
As I walked away, I heard him whisper, “But Superman can.” :rolleyes: I sent someone else to continue the conversation, since I had done the same thing at the same age. I’m still convinced that with a bigger towel it would have worked.
There was a kid in my neighborhood who had an injury of some kind nearly every season of the year…One day we were following footsteps in the snow to the skating pond in the woods when we saw another set of footprints, much wider spaced, with huge splats of red blood in between, heading back to the house. We all looked at each other and said…“must be Thomas”.
That time it was just a broken nose…
When I was a wee tot, my bestus-friend-and-neighbor was over. She took 2 plastic chairs and stacked them (they were not made for stacking in the least) so she could jump off them on to the bed.
This did not go quite as planned, and she ended up breaking her arm. And scaring the shit out of me. And my dad threw away the chairs.
I think this was the moment in my life where I vowed to be a boring, un-adventurous person and never do anything that could possibly cause me to break my arm so I wouldn’t have to scream like that and so no adults would ever give me that “shame, shame, shame” look as they tended to my cast.
It was always nice being the youngest kid in the group. I learned a LOT from the older kids’ mistakes
When my mom’s brother was a kid, he ended up flying out of a window once from bouncing on the bed. It was a second-story window, but luckily the garage roof was right under it.
My only trip for emergency medical care in my life (so far–touch wood), much less in childhood, was due to bouncing on the bed. I was about 4 or 5 and was bouncing merrily with my brother until I got too close to the edge and went off backwards.
The corner of my dad’s stereo cabinet was waiting for my head. Mercifully it let me off lightly; I was out for a second or two and and needed a few stitches. No brain damage (that I know of).
I was a wussy kid. My only major bloodshed after that came from playing with a handsaw, and learning the hard way why you should never put your thumb in front of a moving saw blade. Like everyone who learns the hard way, I’ve carefully avoided it ever since.
When I was around 4 my Dad was watching me while Mum ran a bath. Dad’s “watching” consisted of reading a book in another room while I jumped on my parent’s bed. I bounced off, hit something and punched a hole right through my lower lip, requiring a nice set of stitches. I have a scar to this day, which I’m very self-conscious of.
