Arabella broke her arm shortly after the new year and just got her cast off. It’s really odd to me how this one child, the one who is probably the most sedentary of all, is the one who has broken her arm(s) three times. Nobody else has broken anything ever.
Lest you think I’m some sort of child abuser, I would like to point out that not once was I around when these arms were broken. The first time was when Arabella was a toddler and my mom was staying with the kids while Mister and I were in Las Vegas. Poor Arabella fell off the slide in the backyard. My mom insisted it wasn’t swollen and didn’t seem broken so I didn’t bother taking her to the hospital for several days after I got home. By that point it had already started healing. Whoopsie.
The second break was on her other arm a couple of years ago. She was running on the playground at school and tripped. She caught her fall with her left arm and broke the radius and the ulna. We took her in right away for that one. The sobbing and bulging gave the broken bones away. Plus the school nurse said that when kids brace their falls that way they almost always break their bones. File that tidbit of information away for later use, everyone.
In January I sent Arabella out to get some exercise. She was bored and complainy and it was Christmas Break so she went out to ride her bike. I ran over to the grocery store to pick something up and while I was gone she hit a rock with her bike, fell over and landed on her left arm. Again.
She cried a lot, according to Mister. I didn’t make it home for another hour and she said it didnt hurt that much. So I made her wait a few days to see of the pain went away. Of course it didn’t. So off we went AGAIN to the orthopedist. It was broken and Arabella got her third cast.
What a pain.
I don’t want to suggest that Arabella is in any way klutzy, but the evidence points to the contrary. “It’s your fault for making me get some exercise,” she pointed out as they were wrapping up her cast. “I told you to ride your bike, not fall off of it,” I reminded her.
She’s supposed to be riding her bike to school now that her cast is off but I’m a little wary, seeing as how she is accident-prone. But I can’t very well not let her ride her bike ever again. Chances are, though, that she’ll find a way to injure herself no matter what she does.
*Yes, she’s wearing the same shirt both times. And yes, it’s the same nurse.
It sounds like your klutz is a girl after my own heart. I, too, had three experiences with a cast on an arm (right twice and left once) but I was lucky enough to get an actual diagnosis of klutzy-ness after the third one. My mom was glad to hear it was not brittle bones. I was just humiliated. Watch her though, because I also broke my collar-bone twice and in college there was a compression fracture to a few vertebrae. Good luck!
If she is going to be accident-prone, you should at least teach her to make her explanations for her various mishaps more interesting. When my son needed a cast for a sprained ankle, he ended up telling people, tersely, “Sky diving accident” and stumping away. Because that sounded way more impressive than “I tripped.”