No Pain

     I must admit that I have a lot of guilt over my last post. I wasn't very nice to my boy. But I'm not going to delete it. Ian is a hard kid and I need to be able to express the good as well as the bad. Fortunately his behavior is improving, at least on the home front.
     I've spent the better part of this evening immersed in a Baldacci novel while Ian quietly watched T.V. Every so often I'd head out to the family room and tell him he's too close to the screen. For some reason, he has to have his face pressed to the glass in order to see. Yet he always passes his eye exams. Go figure. The last time I ventured out I found him walking calmly out of the kitchen, a white dishcloth wrapped around his hand. He stopped me and said, "Mom? Can you finish cutting my pickles?"
     "Were you trying to cut pickles yourself?" I asked.
     "Yeah, but I missed."
     That's when I noticed the blood.
     "Ian? Are you okay? Did you cut yourself?"
     He unwrapped the dishcloth to reveal a bloodsoaked thumb, "A little. You are mad?"
     "No, I'm not mad. Let's get that cleaned up."
     He didn't protest as I helped him wash pickle juice off his hands and clean the cut. It was of those that makes you cringe and say to yourself Stitches? Uh...maybe...maybe not...maybe... In the end I settled for Polysporin and a thick layer of band aids. If he bleeds through I might have to rethink the stitches. While doctoring his wound I told him to let me do the cutting from now on. "You aren't quite old enough to use the sharp knives yet, okay?"
     "Okay."
     And that was that. He went back to the T.V. and I went to the kitchen to clean up the mess. On the cutting board I found two large dill pickles, evenly sliced into chunks. He got all the way through his cutting until the last part of the pickle, when his thumb got in the way. Not too shabby. I finished the last part for him. As I wiped off the cutting board he came back into the kitchen, got a paper towel, gathered up his dills and said, "I almost forgot my pickles."