A Very Literal End to Fall Break

We did go out and do something fun yesterday.
We went to the Children's Discovery Garden at Thanksgiving Point and played for a couple of hours.  It was a beautiful day, the kids were great to each other (mostly), and we had a fabulous time.

The kids thoroughly enjoyed the maze

Sam couldn't get enough of the fish

Even Emily was happy to be there

 After starting the day fabulously-sleeping in a little, spending the later part of the morning and early afternoon at the gardens,  the kids still weren't quite done enjoying their day off.

Malia, Alaina and Jacob wanted to go get ice cream.  We are blessed to live in an amazing town where there are plenty of paved trails to carry them safely from our house to the cute little ice cream shop, so off they went.
We have an extra cell phone line for the time being, so I sent them with the phone, just in case, and expected them home in a couple of hours, just in time for dinner and family night.

All was well, they texted me to let me know when they had arrived, and included this fabulous picture.

Melts a mama's heart to see them sharing.
(and loving that they shared to conserve funds for another trip on another day!)

Then came the "we're on our way home" text so I knew when to expect them.

As I glanced up at the clock some time later I figured they should be home within a few minutes.

Which is about when the phone began to ring.

Alaina was in a panic that Malia had crashed and was bleeding "a ton from her mouth and nose!", and toward the end of her panicked reply to my "hello?" she threw in "and I think her arm is broken!".
Awesome.
As I tried to nail down just where they were, I couldn't get anything more out of her than "a few minutes from home" and the fact that they weren't in the neighborhood yet but still out on the path.

Thankfully Aaron had just returned home from work, I could hear an adult there in the background and Malia was calm enough to talk to me.  After sending Aaron off to retrieve her and confirming that she had crashed on her own and not been hit by a car or something (and offering up thanks that she was wearing her helmet), I hung up and waited for details from Aaron.

The other two returned home just a few minutes later and I got the call from Aaron that they were headed off to urgent care with a possible wrist fracture and maybe a broken nose.   Whether her tire hit something or the front of her bike turned or what, we have no idea.  She's not quite sure.  All she knows is that she looked back to make sure that Alaina and Jacob weren't far behind her and next thing she knew she was on the ground bleeding.

The good news is that the wrist is just a sprain, nothing broken.  Not so great news is that the nose is broken.  She's got some pretty good swelling between her nose and her eye, and the color is coming in nicely there.

I am so glad that they have paths to ride on instead of the street, and that we live in such a wonderful place that two different people stopped to see what they can do to help before Aaron got there.

I am also glad that we got some great laughs out of this thing...
Apparently right after it happened Alaina caught up to her and realized that she was pretty hurt.  From what Malia told us, Alaina jumped off her bike, told Jacob to ride home and get us (before she remembered they had a phone) and ran around Malia a couple of times yelling "what do we remember about first aid?  What do we remember about first aid?!"  Upon seeing how much Malia was bleeding from her face she resorted to "You're losing too much blood!  You need to swallow it so you keep enough blood in your body!"
Ah, good intentions.  Maybe we need to review some basic first aid with a couple of our kids.