All He Wants For Christmas

So, he already has one adult top front tooth and the bottom two as well. But that last top front middle tooth was being stubborn and hanging in there. And you know what looks even funnier than a kid with one front tooth missing? And even funnier than a kid with two front teeth missing? A kid with one full grown adult front tooth and one baby tooth : ) It's just so skewed looking. And that stubborn tooth seemed to be getting firmer rather than looser.
But the week of Thanksgiving something interesting happened. Dead in the middle of the night--right when Mommy and Daddy were hitting the deepest darkest part of our lovely sleep cycles, Ezra wandered in and told Daddy his lip was hurting really bad. He was crying. Tadd thought he had chapped lips. I overheard and handed him some Vaseline to apply to Ezra's lips. Ezra kept crying. Tadd rubbed on some more Vaseline and told him to go back to bed. At that point Ezra turned on a light. I managed to drag my body from the bed and went to take a look at Ezra. I was rather surprised to find his face pretty well covered in blood. If I had been awake, surely this would have registered alarm. But since I was asleep it only made me perplexed. I saw that there was blood crusted around his nose. I figured he had a bloody nose but couldn't figure out why he kept crying about his lip. I tried to wash some of the blood with a tissue and led my crying child back to bed where I prayed with him and tucked him in...this time on the bottom bunk, rather than the top. I noticed two large splotches of blood on the carpet (again, WHY weren't alarms triggering????) but didn't do much more than apply some saliva so that the enzymes could do their work (that's right, you can spit on blood to break it down and make it easier to wash out of something, gross as it may be--it works). I headed back to bed, vaguely aware that I should be doing a better job as a mom. But I was too tired to do more than to ask the Lord to take care of my little boy and wonder how on earth a bloody nose could hurt a lip so bad?????
Fast forward to the next morning. I'm sitting on the couch and Ezra wanders downstairs. His lower lip is fat. As in, hanging out past his nose fat. There are still traces of blood on his face. And his top baby tooth is missing. It all came screeching together in my now awake(r) head--he fell off the top bunk in the middle of the night! That's how the tooth fell out. That's how the blood got on the carpet. That's why the lip hurt so bad! My poor boy. That's why he had bad headache...still. I hugged him, and patted his back and congratulated him on another lost tooth and tried to shove my gigantic parental failure into the back of my mind.