The Day Started with Blood

Some things about weddings are a given. For instance, typically there's not a whole lot that's required of the mother of the groom. I didn't have to get deeply involved in invitation choices or cake designs. In the months leading up to the wedding I was not up to my elbows in flower arrangements or caterer discussions. I considered all this to be a good thing. Kylee kept me in the loop by sending me pictures and info so that I had all the details any woman craves without having to do any of the work. Win-win.

The only thing I had to worry about, other than the rehearsal dinner, was getting my six guys to the wedding on time and appropriately dressed. One would think that, with a group like this, that would be an easy task.

One would be wrong.

Sure, four of them are wearing rented tuxes. And then the other two had new suits. Dressing guys is not the problem. Getting them there in one piece is.

I banned airsoft guns two weeks before the wedding so we wouldn't have unsightly welts across their faces. (For those of you that don't know, airsoft guns are the newer, more powerful versions of BB guns.)

I supervised teeth whitening and professional haircuts. I instructed them in wedding etiquette and proper actions while in semi-formal attire.

Clearly we should have spent a little more time in that area.

The wedding was scheduled for 6:30 in the evening. That morning I instructed the boys that we were going to be very low-key that day. We were going to space our showers out throughout the day (all seven of us put a strain on the water pressure abilities of the little house where we were staying.) We would need to start getting ready at 3:00 for the 4:00 p.m. photography call. "Don't even work up a big sweat," I ordered. No easy task when it was 95 degrees outside, but they all agreed to my demands.

I went to take my own shower, but was interrupted a few minutes later by a knock on the door. "Are you almost done?" Luke asked.

I told him I had just gotten in there and was going to take a shower.

"Oh." Pause. "Is there a bandaid in there?"

"They're in the medical kit in my room."

"Okay."  Pause.  "I'm gonna need a lot of them."

I threw my robe on and tore out of the bathroom to find my seventeen year old son standing in the kitchen with his hand covered in blood. Seems he'd been riding a bike when a screw came loose and the front wheel folded up underneath him, catapulting him over the handlebars and landing him in the parking lot where he went skidding across the asphalt. As I tried to clean up all the blood in order to get a look at the (many) wounds all over his hand and fingers, he showed me where his forearm had also taken a beating. I gasped and was turning my attention to the new wound when he said, "I hit my chin, too."

I had to look way up (he's four inches taller than I am now) to see that his entire chin was also smeared and dripping in blood.

I hate to admit it, but I'm shallow enough that my first thought was of the wedding pictures.

Luke's hand, fingers and knuckles were covered with open wounds, but none of them were deep. They did have gravel embedded in them, though, as did the huge scrape on his arm. But his chin had a small but deep chunk torn out of it. I had immediate visions of spending the rest of the wedding day sitting in an emergency room, waiting for stitches.

Bedlam erupted for the next few minutes as I tried to clean the wounds, Luke alternately howled at the pain, insisted he did NOT want stitches and speculated on how to fix the bike, Terry tried to inspect the damage and proclaimed that his chin would probably only require one or two stitches (in a tone that said he wasn't sure it was worth the bother if Luke didn't want them anyway) and Matt trying to shake enough sleep from his eyes to figure out why his brother was covered in blood.

Matt finally volunteered that there was a medical professional or two that attended the church, and one of them could probably tend to Luke. Terry took charge, sending me back to the shower and promising to take care of things.

When I finished dressing, I found out that he'd taken care of things by cleaning and bandaging the wounds himself. Luke had two large bandaids criss-crossing on his chin, and another half dozen bandaids weaving their way across the knuckles of his hand. There were still open and oozing wounds on his hand that the bandages hadn't covered.

"What happened to getting an EMT to look at him?" I asked.

It took several minutes of questioning all three of them before I could put it together. Terry was trying to tell Matt not to call someone that was on duty to make a professional call. He wanted Matt to find someone off duty and ask them to stop in as a favor. That made sense to me, but apparently what Matt heard was, "Don't call anyone". When Matt disappeared without getting medical help, and when Luke insisted he didn't want stitches, Terry finally just cleaned and bandaged his son himself.

SIDE NOTE:  These guys communicate so well. I hope their communication skills worked a little better when they were having THE TALK before the wedding!

I went and bought some clear bandaids, hoping we could at least tone down the damage for the cameras. We had minimal success, as you can see, but it was definitely better than leaving an open wound.

The open wound came later, since the little bandaids wouldn't stay on very long.

I knew we would have some catastrophe the day of the wedding, but truthfully, I was expecting something from Joel or Nicky. Instead, they seem to do just fine.

In more ways than one.