injury

It's been quite a week here at the Burnham house. Between the twitter feeds and flickr pictures I think most of you know that last Friday (8 days ago), Anita and Robbie were out and about in the car when a Ford F150 plowed into them from behind. Luckily traffic was moving slowly at the time so the actual impact speed wasn't too severe, but it was enough to total our car, give Anita some nasty whiplash, and throw our past week into a frenzy.

One of the big questions we've been dealing with is what to do on the transportation front. At the moment (and for another week), we're covered with a rental car that's been provided by our insurance company (and will, ultimately, be paid for by the other guy's insurance). However, after that, while we can borrow something in the short-term, we'll need to get a replacement (as city folk, we only had one car).

At first I thought about just getting something that will run for a few years and get us around. But then I thought back to the last time I did that and remembered how much money I spent keeping the car running. In the end, it was like flushing cash down the toilet.

So I though maybe we should consider getting something that would last us for a while. Part of this included debating what we needed from a car. Here was our list:

• We want something small. Why? We live in the city and parking can be hard to come by. The smaller your car, the more parallel parking spaces you have available to you.
• We want something reliable. When we say, "We're going to have the car for awhile." We're talking, if at all possible, 10-20 years (although, it might be Robbie's car for college in those latter years).
• Since we're going to have the car awhile, we need something with lots of legroom in the back seat. After all, if Robbie stays in the 97th percentile on height, he'll blast past the 6' mark during his teen years.
• We want something that gets good gas mileage. Gas is expensive and using too much of it is rough on the environment. Enough said.
• Safety matters. If we get hit again, we'd like everyone to walk away again.
• Cost also matters. I'm a pastor. Anita teaches part-time. We have a child. All that put together means that, while we're not broke, we don't have an abundance of extra cash either.
• We live in Colorado, so how it handles in bad weather matters. This means front or four wheel drive is necessary and upgrading tires is very likely.

Now, some of these things go well together. Small and good gas mileage are a natural fit. However, other things on that list are somewhat contradictory ... like small and safe or small and rear legroom. However, we think we might have found the answer. The Honda Fit Sport.

Any thoughts or other suggestions?

Throughout most of my life I've had a very short fuse. I think it's the result of being really passionate about, well, pretty much everything. I can quickly become intense about topics ranging from theology to the Broncos and have gone off on a tirade because of things ranging from kids talking while I was trying to teach, to arguments where somebody belittles my point, to something that caused me pain, be it physical or emotional.

I'm not proud of this and have worked hard to control it. Over time I've done a semi-good job, but typically, because I hold so much of the frustration in, when I finally do go off, it's all too often way over the top.

That brings me to today. I was walking in the kitchen and trying not to step on Robbie who was sitting right in the middle of the entryway playing with Tupperware. As I moved my foot around him I smashed my little toe against the wall and knocked off the nail ... well, almost knocked it off, it's still bound to my toe by bit of skin at the base.

Anyway, it starts bleeding on the kitchen floor and throbbing with pain. At this point my initial reaction would be to get angry at the person who caused the accident (because I couldn't possibly admit that my lack of grace was the culprit) and then think about fixing my toe. Well, as I looked down at Robbie, I really couldn't get mad at him so I just hopped into the bathroom to rise out the wound.

Of course one of Robbie's favorite things these days is the bathtub so he heard the water running and came crawling, first into the bathroom and then up my leg so he could get to the water. What's odds is that rather than getting angry, I couldn't help but laugh and, as I did, not only did my frustration level decrease but the pain also went down.

I'm not sure exactly what all this means but I have to wonder if this is a small example of how having Robbie is helping me to be a better man.

Today Robbie proved in a whole new way that he is his father's son.

For those of you who don't know my medical history, it looks something like a set of encyclopedias (you know, the old 26-volume book forms that we used pre-Internet). In my case the letters that take up multiple volumes would be 'k' because of six serious knee injuries and a pair of surgeries and 'e' because of trips to the emergency room for a wide range of injuries (including a couple knee related trips).

Well, today, Robbie celebrated 10.5 months by making his first trip to the ER. Why? Well he loves to climb and eventually, when you love to climb, you're going to fall. In this case he dropped about 4' and landed flat on his back on our hardwood floors. His head caused a loud thud as it hit the floor.

Beyond the usual crying that comes with a fall something else seemed to be wrong. He was content to just sit in our arms and his eyes had this "out of it" look. After about 15 minutes we decided we'd better get him checked out.

Our arrival at the Children's Hospital ER only confirmed our suspicions, not because of the doctors, but because he had no interest in playing with the other kids and happily sat in our laps while we filled out his paperwork (on a normal day it would have been a wrestling match to keep him away from the pen and paper). It wasn't until the nurse was doing the initial screening that he started to act like himself again.

Anyway, we're home now and the best guess is that he did sustain a mild concussion but nothing that will slow him down long-term ... after all, he's already carefree and climbing again.