Splashin' and Apple Pickin'

Lottie is (almost) always happy. I say 'almost' because as I type this I hear her fussing for attention. Nick, with only the use of one hand/arm, is obliging. More on that later.

Nathan likes playing with different plastic aquatic animals when we use the pool and/or buckets of water. Whales, sea lions, starfish, etc.
I mentioned he usually plays in the nude, right?
Lottie just takes it all in.
Oh, and laughs at Mommy. (Zoom in to see her tooth. She actually has three!)
All the kiddos.
Nia cracks me up. She prefers to use my measuring cups in the water.
On to the apple orchard. We went today and picked tons and tons of apples. We're making applesauce, apple butter, and apple pie filling today. We have a pressure canner and so we're puttin' up some canned goods. Nathan was a big help.
Nia just did what she typically does. She ate.
And Nick took pretty pictures of the orchard. Because he's artistic like that.

But about Nick's hand. Remember the little incident several years ago where a stab at home improvement (as I'm rereading this I'm noting the unintended pun) landed Nick in the ER with a sliced open arm and gushing artery? Well, at about 3 AM this morning Nick finally arrived home after work. It was unusually late, but I was sleeping and was blissfully unaware. Nick comes in and taps me on the shoulder.

"Rachel. Rachel?" I open one eye. It's best not to wake fully in the middle of the night if you can help it. "Rachel, I just wanted you to know that I had to go to the ER tonight, but I'm okay, so if you see the bandage on my hand in the morning you don't need to worry."

I can't think of any reason why 1.) I would have have noticed the sight of a 1.5 foot length of skin-colored Ace Bandage wrapped around Nick's arm and 2.) why it would have worried me. But, clearly, there was a good story and, despite the exhausting hour, I woke up fully to hear it.

Nick was taking out the trash at work. I don't know if this is a job that usually falls under the management responsibility category, but that's what Nick was doing. And in order to take the trash out at Chili's, you need to go out to their back dock: a concrete slab that is locked off from the restaurant, and the outside world, that contains the huge trash bin. And while lifting one particularly heavy bag of trash into the bin, he ended up with a slice, just shy of two inches long, right across his wrist. He grabbed his wrist with his other hand and held it as tight as he could because he knew that (aside from the obvious risk of death!) he already only had one artery in the cut arm. If he lost the other, he would lose the use of the arm.

But then he realized that he was still locked, alone, in the back dock. So with his elbow he pushed on the doorbell button and waited until someone let him in. He then solicited a ride to the hospital. When he got to the ER they were able to determine that he hadn't hit the artery. Phew! But he did need stitches. Six of them. And an Ace Bandage.

And then he went back to work.

Oh, and the new hire who accidentally threw eight broken plates in the trash can instead of the bin allocated for sharp or dangerous objects spent much of the night bawling. Nick feels fairly confident that from this point forward she will remember to properly dispose of broken plates.

Nick hadn't taken the time to fill out all the ER paperwork before he headed back to work. He didn't want another manager to have to stay really, really late on account of his incident. So after work he went back to the hospital and spent time filling out paperwork. Then he came home and woke me up to share the story and show off his battle wound.

Now we are heading over to my friend Judy's house (and Nick's friend Ian's house, and Nathan's friend Joel's house, and Nia's friend Hannah's house, and the house where Lottie doesn't have a friend...yet) to kill a chicken and stick it on the rotisserie. Yum.

Yes, we will kill it ourselves. And pluck out its feathers. And rinse out its innards. What do you take us for? Pansies?