"But I'm at Costco..."

So, on Friday I'm at Costco and I am reaching for my phone to call Emily to let her know where I am and my phone rings. Always weird when that happens. So, I answer with a pleasant "hellooo." And she responds with, "Mom, Noah says he thinks he broke or sprained his foot." Unusual greeting if you ask me. No preamble, no gentle lead in, just BAM. And I will readily admit to rolling my eyes a bit at this proclamation. You see, my precious Noah is a bit dramatic when it comes to injuries and so it is hard to know when there is truly something wrong. I was at Costco with shopping to get done and so I was erring on the side of "right, whatever." So, she puts Noah on and he proceeds to start crying into the phone, which you all know means I can't understand a single word of what he is saying from my aisle in Costco. After a few "Honey, I can't understand you, please calm downs" I finally understood that he wanted me to come get him because he couldn't walk home because he hurt his ankle at lunch recess. But I'm at Costco! At that moment God sovereignly ordained that my friend Laurie walked out of her house and saw the tears streaming down Noah's face and came over to help. He handed her the phone and she agreed to take him home for me. Mind you, I'm still thinking "right, whatever" when it comes to this injury. So I continue shopping. (yes, I am the Queen of Compassion) Then I call Sam to ask him a question and I find out that they had called him too (apparently I didn't hear my phone the first time they called) and so he wanted to know what was up. Hmmm. They called Daddy at work, maybe he is actually hurt. So, I called Emily back and by this time they were home and she had Noah laying down with an ice pack on his ankle. "Is it swollen?" "Ooooohhhhh yeah." "Great." So, I got home checked it out and discovered that there was indeed an actual injury. One certainly worthy of tears at the prospect of walking home 4 blocks. What I'm still trying to process is him not going to the nurse's office to have it looked at when he was clearly in a bit of pain from lunch time through 2:45! I guess he was okay sitting at his desk and didn't have to get up all afternoon so it didn't bother him too much. Until of course it was time to leave.

Thankfully, our neighbor is a paramedic and he graciously came over and looked his ankle over and declared it to be truly injured, i.e. sprained or possibly broken. We are in the let's wait and watch it stage hoping upon hope that it is not broken and that we will not have to go to the urgent care and have an xray because that is certainly way more painful than a sprain. So, Noah has had to lay around with his foot propped up and iced. Which isn't so bad for the first few hours, but it does get old for an active 11 year old. And the hopping on one foot thing started out strong, but isn't something that can be kept up for an extended period of time. And then the Lord provided through Rachel's teacher who had a pair of crutches in her garage. How, you ask, did we find out that she had crutches? Well, she was very sweet and came to Rachel's soccer game this morning and during our conversation I mentioned that Noah had sprained his ankle and we didn't have crutches so he was trapped at home. And voila! A short time later we had crutches. So now he is Mr. Hopalong Cassidy and you can bet he loves the attention! Our neighbor did mention to him that girls will fall all over him if he is on crutches and I did notice a little smirk on his face...

Once again proof positive that there truly is never a dull moment around here.