Well into our visit to the children's museum last week, (and right when Brian had offered to go get the remains of our coffee drinks from the car), I and several of the other moms noticed drops of blood all over the wooden floor in front of the stage area. "Uh oh, somebody's kid has a bloody nose!" I quickly take inventory of my own kids (and the others in the general vicinity) and seeing no blood on their faces, remark "it's none of mine." Other moms do the same. After several minutes, and after noticing the blood drops continue further than originally thought... up the stairs, over the walkway, this way and that... and after admittedly casting some level of judgement on the mom who is obviously not watching her children close enough to realize one of theirs has blood dripping down his face and all over the floor throughout the museum (it was DRIPS of blood, so it logically had to be a bloody nose)... around the corner comes Hallie again (remember I'd JUST checked her face for blood minutes ago), her right foot absolutely COVERED in blood. After the initial seconds of shock wore off, I grabbed Natty under my right arm (Brian still wasn't back), Hallie under my left, and made a bee-line for the restroom, blushing all the way and announcing sheepishly "I found the blood!" to each of the moms now casting their own (well-deserved) judgemental glances my way.
It turned out she had stubbed her toe (though she couldn't remember where or when, and it still bewilders me that she didn't think blood gushing from her foot was something she should come tell me) at just the right angle that her toenail cut into the end of her toe. We ran it under cold water for quite some time, applied pressure with the guaze a manager had brought in, sprayed it with hydrogen peroxide, bandaged and taped it and she was off and running again. We filled out an accident report with another employee, and I kept apologizing to the manager, but she was great about it. She even gave Hallie a toy (a kit of scratch-off pictures) to play with later in the day (despite that the injury was not due to negligence on the part of the museum at all, and we'd made a nice bit of work for the employee that had to disinfect the floors while I cleaned the foot.) The manager's parting comment was something to the tune of "We try to make things as safe was we can in here, but if we removed everything that a child could possibly hurt themselves on, there'd be nothing left to explore." I had to agree.
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