Family Night in the ER

Monday nights are family night. We have familyhomeevening (Mercy always makes fun of me for saying it like it's one word). Instead of the usual, Mom invited Joe, Kori, and Pierson over for an early birthday celebration for Dad. We had a yummy dinner, watched some precious home videos and had so much fun playing with Pierson. He keeps getting more and more fun to play with as he gets older. Pierson absolutely loves playing outside, so I took him and Liv over to the apartment playground.

I was pushing Pierson in the baby swing and Livia was swinging a swing away on the big girl swing. All of a sudden the chain on Livia's swing broke. It was completely rusted and just snapped mid-air!

She landed on her stomach and burst into tears. I was in shock. What was I supposed to do? Should I leave Pierson in the swing or take him out? I made sure Livia wasn't bleeding to death and didn't need any immediate emergency medical attention, and then I got Pierson out of the swing. I figured it probably wasn't a good idea to leave him in a swing if the chains just snap out of nowhere. I called my mom to come over, but because I was using a calm voice so I wouldn't upset Livia, she thought it was no big deal and walked over to the playground instead of bringing the car to pick us up. While Mom was on her way, I held Pierson with one arm and tried to take care of Liv with the other. She said it hurt to move and I certainly wasn't going to force her to push it. I didn't know if anything was broken and I didn't want to make it worse. I was worried she might have broken her collarbone so I gently pushed her back to see if it hurt her; it didn't. When Mom got to the playground Liv was still lying on the ground. I then called my Dad and he, Joe, and Kori drove over to the playground in the van.

Livia was especially complaining about her left arm. As she had broken this arm previously, we thought it was likely that she could have re-fractured it. Mom didn't want to take any chances, so we headed to the pediatric ER. I was just going to stay home since there was no need for me to go sit at the hospital, but Liv insisted I needed to go with her, so I did.

The ER was relatively quiet, so we weren't there for long in ER standards. But it was still several hours. I sat in the waiting room and talked to Dad while Mom went back with Liv to get x-rays and see the doctor. Dad and I talked about every subject under the sun (okay, that's a lie - but we did have a good conversation that went deeper than our usual "who do you think is guilty on this episode of The Mentalist?") The final verdict: Liv sprained her arm. No broken bones! Woo hoo!

I definitely saw the power of prayer throughout this whole ordeal. We prayed while we were waiting on Mom to get to the playground. We prayed in the car on the way to the hospital. I posted an update on facebook and tons of people joined us in praying for Livia. The whole thing could have been a lot worse. She could have been very seriously injured. I truly believe Heavenly Father was watching over my little sister and kept her safe. She has big things to do in this world, and I'm thankful that she only had a minor setback (you can do most anything in a sling, except for pull your own pants down to potty ;) pahahaha)




P.S. The silly apartment people hung the swing back up by its rusty chain! They just had to make it higher since the top part of the chain broke. Simply unacceptable. Big sister will be talking to the managers about that tomorrow.