The playful giggles, a ball in his hand, a smile on his face as he runs to your open arms. You swoop him up into a big bear hug, smoother in kisses, then he’s back on the ground to continue to run. Until he takes a digger. Then your heart breaks, the tears shed and you’re not quite sure if it’s just from him or both of you. That sucks as I have flash backs of all my scraped knees, elbows, hands, and remember of how painful it is. Hell, it still hurts today when you slide wrong in volleyball and get a sand burn.

This particular fall wasn’t terrible by any stretch of the medical world; no broken bones, not a ton of blood that I would faint, not a trip to the urgent care or the ER. However, the world was on the verge of ending that evening in Maddox’s world. Which is crazy because he has scraped his knee at school before (and worse). Daddy and I pick him up and carry him into the house, just to try to calm him down so he could breathe (thankfully we did his vest treatment earlier in the night otherwise that would not have been an option. LOL). We get it cleaned up and put the band aid on but this poor child was still feeling the pain of having scraped knee for the next few hours.

So, mommy creativity kicks in to help distract and talk about his knee and here’s what I came up with. The fire engines are working to put out burn/fire on his knee. We need to give the little fire fighters a chance to get to the owie and put it out. Then the construction crew can come in and fix his knee back to new. But it would take the construction crew all night to fix his knee and that the sooner that the fire fighters get there to fix his knee the better. He was so intrigued about the fire fighters and their job to fix his knew that we talked about it for at least half an hour. I could tell that scrape was still pretty painful to him as he didn’t want to bend his knee, wanted us to carry him but I could tell that he kept looking at it and thinking about what we talked about.

Then I heard the light bulb click in his head, ‘When we will see the big trucks get here’. Dang it kid, you’re to smart ;). What hell did I just start? I can only imagine that when he learns of 911 and his scrapes knees again that we just might see the fore trucks.

So the quick back pedal of trying to get him to understand that his little body has little tiny fire trucks inside of him to rush to emergencies to fix things and if your knee hurts means that your body is working and they are rushing to fix it. Then he was quiet. (did he buy it/understand it?). ‘So there’s little fire trucks trying to to fix my knee?’ ‘yup buddy, let’s go to bed so they can do their job’. ‘Ok mom’.

The next morning, we woke up and realized that the band aid fell off in bed and he didn’t bat an eye lash. We explained that the construction crew worked over night to get him all better so you can go back to playing. Then we had the car ride to school and he had a meltdown that he needed a bandaid on his owie, which I didn’t grab. Thankfully school has an unlimited supply of bandaids and were able to get him back up to speed.

It’s the small things of being a child that add up. It’s just a scraped knee, right? But to have that comfort and support system being built that it’s ok to cry, it’s ok to feel the pain – it means that you’re alive. The pain will eventually stop and as he gets older the hugs and cuddles with mommy will stop and he’ll just rub dirt in it and keep playing. Now that makes me cringe and want to pass out, gross.

One of the Facebook posts I was reading from another CF mommy was that their kids have a hard time keeping band-aids on as their skin was so salty that it wouldn’t stick. Definitely throws an interesting twist if we ever have the bigger injuries that need more than one and need to stay on longer than a night. There are days were you can tell he was sweaty as he is salty but most of the time, I don’t even notice. Maybe because we are staying up on his sodium intake with his French fries and cheese curds. 🙂