ER Trip #245: "Ask Me" Edition

Once upon a time, Tuesday night, we were volunteering at our church’s Vacation Bible School, rebranded as “Summer Spectacular”, when I got that dreaded text from the children’s ministry saying that we needed to come get Beckett from class.

I immediately started to panic because a) Beckett loves Bible class where he learns about “Jethuth” and b) he never ever ever ever cries there. Like, ever. As in, they’ve never paged me in the entirety of his childcare experience. As in, sometimes when class is over and we pick him up to go home he screams like he’s being kidnapped.

So I knew something bad had happened. He ran away? Got a mild concussion? Broke an arm? Severed his femoral artery?

Shockingly it wasn’t as dramatic as I was anticipating. It ended up being a small gash by his eye from doing really holy things  being so overcome with the Spirit… sliding down a slide and hitting a table. Or something.

It wasn’t bad, but it was bleeding pretty heavily so we decided to take him to our home away from home, Cook Children’s, the site of many traumatic events in our family’s history, such as the seizure and the Monster’s Inc transportation unit. (Related: if anyone knows how to direct deposit paychecks straight to Cook Children’s billing ladies, let me know. It’d save us all a lot of time and stamps.)

They fixed him up with some dermabond and we were good to go.

Except.

As we were walking into the ER I looked at Taylor and realized that we were still wearing our matching tshirts from Summer Spectacular. The bright orange ones that said nothing but “ask me” on the front.

Ask me…what happened? Ask me…why my kid’s face is gushing blood? Ask me…why we have these matching shirts to begin with?

It’s actually a very versatile shirt. The simplicity of the text lets the reader ask anything and everything. Or nothing. The sky is the limit, really.

It makes total sense when you’re wearing it as part of a greeter team at your church’s VBS. It makes zero sense as a matching family in an ER waiting room.

The thing is…I’m really not completely shocked at the awkwardness of our clothing choice. This has happened before, you know.

The first time Beckett went to Cooks when he was 2 days old, I stood over his NICU bed sobbing my eyes out in a shirt a little too small for my post-birth belly that read “Beckett’s mom”. Taylor stood near me in a shirt that read “Beckett’s dad”. We didn’t even need to use our super secret hospital code words to visit our child. We let our matching parent shirts do all the talking.

Should I be concerned that this is a trend? Not only have we made way more trips to the ER than the average family, but more often than not we’ve been wearing identical shirts while doing so.

In case the “ask me” shirts weren’t weird enough, our entire family was also wearing matching yellow wristbands. Not a big deal.

Except.

Our Summer Spectacular wristbands were the exact same material and color as the ER wristbands, as if to say, “You know what? Don’t even worry about making us hospital bands. I went ahead and made some at home before we left. It has our name, our family ID…you can thank me later.”

replacement band pictured above. the original was printed very officially, much like exactly like the hospital band.

The moral of the story is:

Don’t take your kids to VBS. It’s much too dangerous.

Just kidding.

The real moral of the story is to always go with your gut and find your ER doctor friend at church before you spend $900 at Cooks, because you just never know when said ER doctor friend has a tube of dermabond on his person at that very moment.

Because sometimes that happens. Like on Tuesday, for instance. I would’ve gladly kept my $900 had I known this information beforehand.

Actually, I would’ve even given my doctor friend some of that money just to watch him glue my kid’s face in the back of the church building while dressed as Joseph’s brother, Gad.

Oh well.

In the meantime, if you see Taylor and I wearing matching shirts, be on high alert. There’s a good chance we’re about to head to the closest emergency room.