Last week, another mom on the swim team (with three boys of her own) offered to take Andy, Benjamin and Elias to boy scout day camp and to keep them overnight on the top of Mt. Lemmon. After ascertaining that she was serious and not crazy, I took her up on her offer. Ron dropped the guys and all their overnight gear off to her in the McDonald's parking lot Wednesday morning at 8am. The plan was for Mrs. S. and the six boys to drive up to the top of Mt. Lemmon to Camp Lawton, the boy scout camp, and to spend all day doing scout stuff with the day camp, then to spend the night on the mountain in tents and sleeping bags. Then they would get up Thursday morning and spend all day doing boy scout stuff again (a whole different set of activities), and come down the mountain around 4:30pm. This means that I was to have 36 hours with only James in the house. It was really strange.

So Wednesday morning, I took James to swim practice and then we did some errands. I called Ron and suggested that he should take the two of us to lunch, since all the other guys were gone, and James was devestated that he couldn't go camping too. While we were in line at Sweet Tomatoes, Ron's cell phone rang. He answered it, and I hear "Oh, hi. Yes. Yeah. How bad? Oh. Well, we are just about to sit down to lunch. Yeah. Yes. Yes, but we are just about to sit down to lunch. Can you give me 15 minutes? Bye." I ask who was on the phone, and Ron tells me that it was Mrs. S. and that Elias might need stitches. I told him to call her back and tell her that I was on my way to get Elias. We never did get in touch with her, so we ate lunch and then I drove over to the base of Mt. Lemmon to pick up Elias.

Mrs. S. drove up about a minute after I got there and Elias got out of the car with a huge white bandage on his face, covering his nose. The story was that he had been running to the bathroom and tripped on something and fell right on to a tree stump. He had a huge cut right next to his nose. I peeled the bandage off and after looking at the gaping hole next to his nose, decided that we would go to the ER, instead of Urgent Care. I called around and got a babysitter for James, and took Elias to the ER. Elias was so upset and was crying a lot. Was he upset about bashing his face? Nope. He was upset about having to leave scout camp and missing archery. Here is a picture of Elias at the ER when all the bandages were taken off.


After they had cleaned the wound out, and the doctor had told me that it was almost all the way through to his teeth, they put in 3 stitches and told Elias that he wasn't allowed to swim for a week. Elias didn't even twitch when they were putting in the stitches. They had used a lidocaine gel in the cut and he didn't feel a thing. Here is a picture of Elias after being cleaned up and numbed (that is why there is a big white area), but before they have stitched him up.


That evening, Ron took Elias back up to the boy scout camp where he was the hero of the hour with the stitches. It has healed beautifully and the stitches were taken out yesterday.

Tonight was the first swim meet of the season for the guys. James still cannot make it across the pool, so he wasn't swimming, but the other guys did very well. I do think we might have a competition problem with Andy and Benjamin. I don't think that Andy cares, but I know Benjamin wants to beat Andy. Tonight, Benjamin edged Andy out of first place in the 50yd freestyle by about an inch and a half. It was really exciting! Benjamin did very well in his butterfly race and Andy did very well in his breast-stroke race. Elias did really well overall, and was asked to take a spot in the freestyle relay at the end of the meet. He was thrilled about this.

In this picture, Benjamin is in lane one and Andy is in lane 4. I don't know who won this one, but I liked that the picture had both of them in it.
Here is Benjamin doing butterfly.

Andy is talking to the coaches here -- probably planning his race strategy. Can you believe how skinny he is?