Before I go much further with the story and the explaining of what happened. I will first say that the munchkin is doing really well right now, and in good spirits; which is going a long way to upping his parent’s spirits and making them feel better.

This picture was taken of him this morning after we had changed his bandages. Right now he’s sitting on the couch playing. This isn’t quite normal behavior for him but he’s having fun chatting away. He’s usually a little more active but he’s been through a lot.

The injury occurred Sunday afternoon. He got hold of a mug of hot tea that my brother-in-law had just brewed and pulled it over himself while trying to be a big boy and drink out of a cup. One of those split seconds of attention lapse where you think everything is fine and there’s nothing around that could pose any danger as you have areas cut off by baby gates and there are four other people in the house.

We realized something was amiss when he started screaming and there was a spilled mug and tea bag on the floor. I whisked him into the bathroom to wash off the hot tea stripping his t-shirt off as I did so, not realizing how hot the tea had actually been until I was starting to wash him off and saw the welts and blisters bubbling up. My husband had gone into “cop mode” in the mean time, gathered ice in a baggie with a towel and had the phone ready to call the ambulance once he had chance to assess the injuries in person when I got out of the bathroom with the baby.

As soon as he saw the blistering he called the paramedics. It seemed like the longest time ever until they showed up even though I know they were quick. First was the one who zooms ahead on a motorcycle, and then two more with the actual ambulance. They assessed first degree and possibly second degree burns on site and started bringing stretcher and supplies and things in. It was elected that I would go with the munchkin and my husband would follow along to the hospital. I know more of the munchkin’s medical history off the top of my head and he would probably be more comforted by than by my husband at that time.

He was screaming and crying at the top of his lungs the whole way up onto the stretcher and into the ambulance. I went first and then he was put in my arms. They gave me an oxygen mask to hold in front of his face to make sure he didn’t hyperventilate. Saw the burns were primarily on his chest to just above his navel, a small amount of splash damage on his chin, and then found out that the close hospital would not admit him, that we would have to go to the children’s hospital in the next city, a good fifty minute drive under good traffic conditions.

So, one of them called for air rescue, while the other tried to assure me that my son would be okay, that this was just a standard procedure so that he could get the best possible care the most quickly, without the added trauma of being driven an hour or so while they avoided traffic and everything. We were driven a few minutes away to a place with enough parking lot that the chopper could land. While we waited the paramedics tried to get an IV into the munchkin but he fought and screamed and screamed and fought, and nothing I could do would calm him down.

Two nice men showed up out of the chopper. Helped me out, and assessed if I would be going with them or not. I told them I would because I didn’t want to leave him on his own. That yes I am afraid of heights and I have gotten travel sick but that I would deal to stay with my son. They got my weight and his weight, and had me follow them at a specific angle so as not to get beheaded by the rotors, and strapped me in and gave me headphones to help against the noise.

They got the munchkin in on the other side of some equipment, and maneuvered things so that I could hold his hand. He actually calmed down for a bit while we were in the chopper.

We got to the hospital very quickly, and I have to say that landing in a chopper, has to be one of the smoothest ever aerial landings I’ve experienced. One of the attendants climbed out, helped me out and led me to a safe spot on the edge of the helipad until they could get the munchkin out and on to the waiting stretcher.

So, then we were whisked down to trauma, assessed, worked with, and assigned a bed. We didn’t actually get the bed until about 10 p.m. by which time my husband and father-in-law had been and gone. My husband stayed with him while they were removing all the blisters and dead skin and bandaging him, and then they got food, and I got food, and it was decided about 9 p.m. that I would stay with the munchkin at the hospital and my husband would go back home given my father-in-law was in a bad state worrying about leaving my mother-in-law who has terminal cancer at home without him.

So, my husband told me that I should call him first thing as soon as the doctor’s said anything about prognosis and he would come up bring whatever supplies I or the munchkin needed and we would go from there.

The nurses at the E.R. were amazing. There were two on duty and they made sure there was one with us pretty much constantly talking about various things that were going on and things that kept me distracted and awake, haranguing the other staff in the other departments about where the bad was at and why didn’t we have it yet, and even gave me candy, and brought wipes and things out given the diaper bag had been brought but there was nothing in it really expect a couple of toys, mostly swim diapers and butt cream. They also gave me a hospital gown so that I didn’t have to sleep in my clothes.

The next two days are starting to blur together a bit because of sleep-deprivation. Monday saw us up at around 6 a.m. after being up several times during the night because of the munchkin’s IV needing to be moved from his foot to his hand, him picking the gauze off his bandages and them having to be replaced, and him having exploding nasty poop because of the medications in his system. They had him on morphine at first, and the saline IV so lots of liquid, not so much solids in there.

At 9 a.m. we were taken down to “WhirlPool” which I think was harder on me than him. They took all his dressings off and assessed his wound, and then he got to have a jacuzzi bath. They washed the wound and softened the skin, removing any more dead skin that hadn’t been taken off previously and then drying him carefully so they could put on the “BioBrane” dressing. Then he was rebandaged: gauze, gauze bandage, ace bandage, and we were sent back upstairs, whereupon he slept for about six hours, and I tried and failed miserably to do so.

After WhirlPool it was decided that he had such good pain tolerance that he could be dropped to kiddie Tylenol for pain instead of morphine as long as we had no objections, which, of course, we didn’t. Pain reliever versus narcotic on small child, easy choice really. They also put him on Keflex as an antibiotic to make sure his wound doesn’t get infected.

It was decided that we would stay overnight at the hospital again as we had to be at WhirlPool early the next morning for another check-up, and with us living about (on average) an hour away from the hospital and already exhausted that it would be better overall if we just stayed.

About 11 p.m. I was regretting that decision because the munchkin was wide awake having slept most of the day and I was exhausted, and sore, and at that numb tired stage where thinking hurts.

We survived though. I kept repeating to myself that this was the best for the munchkin and it was good for him that I was there, and that I would get to sleep once we got home and everything was going to be okay.

When we went to WhirlPool the next morning we found out that he was healing much more quickly than they’d expected so we could be released to go home, and not come back until the Thursday morning for a check-up as long as we could change his bandages at home. They walked me through how to do that, and signed us out with a prescription for Keflex and phone numbers of various staff members if something should come up or there were any questions we suddenly thought of.

Yesterday’s check up went equally well. We were scheduled for 9:30. I got there at right around 9, and was out by 9:25. They say he’s healing at a great rate, that even though certain things about his wound look really gross, they’re actually good signs. That he’s eating well is a great benefit because eating, especially protein rich foods, is encouraging the healing, so we have to keep up with that, and he should be fine.

They’re saying if there’s any scarring it will be minimal. The main thing will be once he does heal up and is allowed to go around bandage free to make sure he’s either covered or has on very high SPF sunscreen because the freshly healed areas will be a lot more sun sensitive than the rest of his body.

I am so incredibly, incredibly grateful that he is still bouncing around destroying things.
It was such a very, very scary ordeal.

We had a pretty bad/traumatic weekend; wound up at the hospital Sunday-today because the munchkin has burns on his chest; he pulled scalding hot tea on to himself while we were at the in-law’s.

He’s healing very well so we don’t have to go back to the hospital until Thursday.

I got to ride in a chopper with him, air-lifted to the local children’s hospital as it’s an hour drive away and our close hospital isn’t equipped to deal with burns/small children. It’s amazing what you can do when your child is in danger. I’m terrified of heights.

The Bluest Butterfly asked me:

Since you are into self portraits…could you post photos of your different hairdos over the years?
I don’t understand how people get those streaks in there hair…like you have in the blog for a year contest photo. Could you do a post about how to put steaks in your hair?

These pictures are in lieu of Self Portrait Sunday as this will post on Sunday, and we’re very busy this weekend as my husband’s family are in town. We’re doing inheritance things, dividing certain things up while his mother is still alive, because she wants to be able to tell us all stories about where various things came from and why/if she wants them to stay in the family. It’s sad, but also refreshing, in some ways because my husband and his brother get along very well, so unlike I’ve seen with some branches of my own family and heard with other people’s families there’s none of that nasty back-stabbing or bickering going on about who gets what.

Anyway on with the pictures of my hair:

This is the last time my hair was at it’s original color.
It’s my 1995 (Year 11) high school portrait, taken just a few months before we emigrated, probably that October if I remember how they used to do school pictures properly.
It’s also the shortest that my hair was for a while, because I started the “will grow hair out as long as possible” project after it was cut off that previous August. As I came to really regret cutting it short. That lasted until about 2001 when my hair was so traumatized because of the various ways I dyed it in college (which I unfortunately don’t have pictures of all of them) that I had to cut it off again, and was then growing it out until this past April when I cut it all off by my own choice, this time.

So, on with the show.
1. 1997, me in my hippie phase with my first car.
2. Summer 1998 or 1999, home from college, early dye experiments with “Chocolate Cherry” shade. Self-dyeing, or dyeing by room mates at that point with OTC products.
3. This was after my hair was recovering from being killed, mutilated and over-dyed. Mum paid for she and I to get glamor portraits done. That was when I was streaking it for the first time.
4. More of the streaking, just going brighter shades of red. It was the wildest I could get away with at work, given I worked for a library (government) and couldn’t do purples or blues without getting reprimanded.

1. 2.
3. 4. The “straight streaks” are done by dyeing the hair one color and then threading certain parts of it through a cap, and bleaching them out, or dyeing the darker, depending on how you want to do it. Other times my hair dresser has wrapped portions of my hair in tin foil and pasted them with the alternate colors of dye and then rolled them up on my head to “cure” before rinsing it all out and drying it off. It really depends on how thick I want the strips to be, and probably varies from stylist to stylist depending on how they prefer to operate.

At some point in between the streaks and the red/purple. I had my hair just RED; but I can’t find any shots of that now :-p

When I did my hair purple and red however, like the “Blog of the Year” pictures, or as shown in these two shots:

That was done by dividing my hair into three sections, one for each of the front red pieces, and one for the main purple portion. The front red pieces were done in the tin foil while the rest was dyed with the purple mix.

If I’m dyeing my hair now I pay my stylist to do it. After the mess that my hair wound up college, so horrendously damaged that we had to chop it all off…a good foot of hair; I’m so scared to try anything by myself now that I will only go to the salon to get it done. Thankfully I have a very cool stylist, who loves when I go in and go, “You know, I think I want my hair purple today,” she goes, “OMG GREAT. I’ve always wanted to dye someone’s hair purple!!” rather than looking at me like I have five heads, as other stylists I’ve gone to have done.

I miss having the whacky colors. Next time I go, and I’m really overdue because my short hair is getting to the point where it’s unruly and I have to wear an alice band to keep it out of my eyes I’m going to do purple and red again. I keep thinking I might want to get some blue streaks in the purple, but I don’t know. Blue doesn’t last as long in hair because it’s an “unnatural base shade”. That also means that when it starts to fade out it will fade out to grey rather auburn as the purple has (which you can see by looking at my regular Self Portrait Sunday Photos.

I have other means at my disposal if I want a quick change with my hair; because I used to cosplay I have a couple of wigs at my disposal. My long red wig can get very hot to wear, but I love the shade. The blue one is actually a lot easier to wear now that my hair is short, because I don’t have to braid my hair into about six-twelve braids, wrap it on my head, pin it and then put the wig cap and wig on:

Also, from time to time I will digitally alter the pictures. Some of my readers may have seen the glamor shot picture before, but more likely in this format:

I was disappointed that I didn’t have any pictures from my hair being blue in college, so I altered the glamor shot to the appropriate shade and have used it around and about as a self-icon before.Okay, so there we are. Hopefully once my husband’s family goes back up North I’ll be able to have some time to go to the salon. It gets awkward, because I don’t want to take the munchkin with me, because asking him to sit and behave that long at his age is nigh on impossible, but there aren’t so many people who can babysit him during the week, when I’ve liked to go, as they all work during the week, during the day. Tends to happen that I book a hair appointment and my husband’s chief schedules a meeting for that afternoon, and hubbie can’t really take the munchkin to meetings.

Ah, well, we’ll sort something out.

I have a friend who is auctioning artwork. She also has artwork on deviantart and does commissions for both art pieces and dolls.

She’s very talented. Buying from her is supporting a starving artist ^_~

Hectic time here; my husband’s brother and his son are down from NY. We got eaten by the airport’s city bringing them up to his parents house from the there. I’ve been doing good driving in the city for about a year so I suppose it’s only fitting that I get eaten again. Instead of it taking 45 minutes to get back, which is what it took to get down there, it took almost three hours; because not only did we get eaten but by the time we got spat back out it was rush hour.

I saw this quiz on BCMom’s Livejournal and I thought I would have a go.

Free Online Dating from Mingle²

The perfectionist in me is really mad that I missed a question or two to wind up with 93%, but thankfully the quiz shows the answers afterwards so I can learn about what I got wrong.

I’ve also been tagged by Beth & Cory’s Mom to do the Middle Name Meme. So here we go…

The Rules:

1. You have to post the rules before you give the facts.
2. You must list one fact that is relevant to your life for each letter in your middle name. If you don’t have a middle name than use a name that you like.
3. When you are tagged you must write a post containing your own middle name game facts.
4. At the end of your post you must tag one person for each letter in your middle name.. Don’t forget to comment them telling that they are tagged and to read your post to get the rules.

My middle name, Catriona: (it is! I just go by it…does this mean I should have used my first name?)

C: Can almost rebuild a computer from scratch.
A: Anime fan ^_^
T: Takes a long time to do memes.
R: R, my first name begins with R.
I: Internet is my main means of having social contact during the week.
O: Only one more year until my ten year high school reunion. This scares me somewhat.
N: Nearly a U.S. citizen. I hope the government gets in touch soon!
A: Ami-chan was a nickname I got in high school. There are tons of people I know who think it’s actually my name!

Okay, so there are 8 letters in my middle name O.o so I’m supposed to tag 8 people…fwhee. I’ll have to come up with something.

1. Bluest Butterfly from A Virtual Hobby Store and Coffee Shop
2. Elizabeth from Table4Five
3. Val from Busy Momma
4. Mrs.Lisa from Hippie Spelunker
5. Ranee from frenchkitten.net
6. Molly from Unheard Melodies
7. Miss Kitty from The Synergizer
8. Skeet from Skeet’s Stuff

I’m trying to get people who have commented recently, and also who don’t appear to have been already tagged.

I was anticipating having to call about one of our credit cards yesterday, but the bill showed up before I did. We’ve had problems before living in apartments with credit card companies neglecting to put the apartment number on, and then the mail being returned, and then them sending it to my ILs house and them forgetting to give it to us…and late fees….and so on. Of course, I still don’t actually have the card itself, which I will be calling about, but at this point, really more worried about the bill.

I was pleasantly surprised when the bill arrived to us, on time and to the right place. Our intent since it’s a lo-balance credit card, that I basically just signed up for to get 10% off the XBox 360 is to do a credit card balance transfer from that card to my business card, so instead of it having a 23% interest it will have 0%…and it will thusly be paid off, another good mark against our credit.

This is all in the fact that we constantly compare credit cards against each other. My business card has the highest spending limit, but also the highest payment, unlike the rest each time the balance goes up the minimum payment goes up. My husband’s card’s minimum payment has been stuck at $35 from it being $1000 on there to now almost $3000 with the purchase of the car on it. This new card has $500 on it, what were they asking for payment? $10! I couldn’t believe it $10 and the interest is 23% there’s a great way to ruin my finances right there. I guess they have to make up for the 10% discount.

Thankfully I never just pay minimum payment. I try to pay double if I can, if not at least $20 more. Although thinking about it I’ve been paying $100 on my husband’s card, and the payment asked is $35, so that’s almost triple. Really, it depends on how much money we have…but never, never do I just do minimums because I’ve seen what that does. I’ve had a friend who was basically juggling her balances backwards and forwards across two, and then three cards, because she kept just absolutely having to buy something. Not even freshman year in college and she was declaring bankruptcy…

TDavid from Make You Go Hmm! asked:

Ok, so what’s the meaning of life?

Well, as many people would tell you the ultimate answer to “Life, the Universe and Everything” is 42, but then if we know the question from which that answer is derived the whole universe ceases to exist so I better stop there on that one.

For me the meaning of life has for the longest time been to find answers about my own self, my past and future lives, to make that I’m learning the important lessons about being a person, and experiencing spiritual growth before I go on to the next cycle. For me I came to this life with a plan of certain things I needed to learn and experience, and certain problems from other lives which needed to be addressed and worked through.

I recently had a former classmate from high school in England get in touch with me through MySpace, when I was looking through his photo album on the site I saw tons of pictures of Sydney, Victoria, and Melbourne in Australia. Even a very rainy one of the Sydney Opera House, which he’d captioned “believe it or not they had a water shortage!”

Looking at it right now, if he went again tomorrow the Hotels in Melbourne are just that little bit cheaper than the Hotels in Sydney. The Hotels in Brisbane are the most pricey though, so maybe that’s the place to visit first, or just avoid, go there by public transport or something.

I have another penfriend who lives in New South Wales, the province that Sydney is in. She would always tell me about the huge farm they had about 500 acres of rolled flat land, and how their neighbor could see Sydney itself from his back porch. She’s been offering me place to visit and place to stay since I’ve known her as long as I was willing to help out on the farm and trek through the bush with her doing chores. Maybe a few years ago if I’d had the money…now it’s looking less and less likely that I’ll be visiting anyone out of the country any time soon.

Wow, I just finally worked out how to use a feed-reader. It’s easier than I thought…but it’s taken until I’ve installed Thunderbird as my email program for me to actually do it. Seems to be working great, though, I’ve been going around adding a lot of people’s blogs to it so that it’s easier for me to keep track of them.

Speaking of my friend’s blogs. My friend Molly is soon to be a published author. I may have mentioned her book “Chasing Byron” before, actually I think I talked about it on Ergo Writing, but perhaps not so much here.

She’s in the stage where she’s having to decide on now she wants the book to look. Check out her post with her top three choices for cover art and help her see which one *pops* more. Personally, I’m thinking the second one…

We’re a bit later than we’ve been the past few weeks with the Self Portrait Sunday today because I was out errand running most of the morning.

Yesterday my errands got cut short because the munchkin decided it was melt-down day. After I left the grocery store with only half of the shopping I discovered he was probably having a but of a stomach bug given the cause for the melt-down became apparent (I will leave it to the imagination) — let’s just say things were very stinky and repeatedly so.

So, today we endeavored to do the rest of the groceries and also went out to another store because one thing I had discovered yesterday was that the grocery store doesn’t have lunchboxes. Well, at least not the sort a police officer needs to have in his car (I don’t somehow think he’d really want Dora-the-Explorer…)

So, today’s Self-Portrait was taken in the car at the Target parking lot. This is actually the first one I took, although I took several because I thought that this one might not have come out okay, given the light and everything with being in the car. Be sure to check out the rest of the participants at today’s self portrait sunday entry over at DigiCass.

Also if there’s anything you want to ask me be sure to go ahead