First Bandaid

Elizabeth always comes home from Ellie's doctor appointments talking about the development milestones that Ellie has met. I got curious and went looking for such information online. The first one I found was pretty satisfying. I saw mention that kids around Ellie's age enjoyed searching for hidden objects. I figured she'd enjoy playing a shell game.

The next evening when I came home from work, I gave it a shot. I grabbed a few mugs and a little blue block and started sliding cups around. Ellie was pretty good at following my slow sliding and more often than chance picked the right cup on the first try. She was pretty excited to shout out something like "There it is!" whenever she or I turned over the cup hiding the block.

Unfortunately, she got a little too excited and picked up one of the mugs. I'd been dumb enough to use regular ceramic mugs as props when playing a game with my toddler. When she predictably dropped the mug, it landed on another, cracking into two. Of course, that produced two even more interesting objects, which she tried to pick up.

I quickly got her away from the pieces and checked her hands to make sure she wasn't cut. I didn't see an injury, so I counted my blessings, cleaned up the pieces, and got a set of plastic cups to continuing playing with. After a bit I noticed that one of the cups had a red smear. I looked a little more closely at Ellie's hands to discover that she'd slightly cut her middle finger. It was minor, but we put a bandaid on it mostly to keep from blood staining anything else.

When we placed the bandaid on her finger, we told her it was a "bandaid" and she repeated the word "bandaid" back to us. We sat down to dinner shortly after. Ellie didn't use the injured hand to eat. Mostly she left the injured hand open and stiff fingered. A few times she tried to pick at the bandaid and we asked her not to. Then she just pointed at the bandaid and said something that sounded like "elmo" over and over. We had no idea what she was talking about, but she insisted on pointing and saying "elmo." This is the first time we've really noticed her using a word that we couldn't figure out. When dinner was over, she grew more interested in the bandaid. I pulled it off to find the cut was effectively sealed. She experimentally bent her freed finger a few times and then, as if nothing had happened, ran off to play.