Mysteries

Hello,

At 9:30 in the evening caller ID stated the call was from daughter Sarah in DC. Of all of our children Sarah is the most likely to go to bed at 10:00 at night and it was now 10:30 her time. My senses went on alert for something to be out of the ordinary and that often means negative. At first no one spoke then 20 month old Natalie started talking. Natalie goes to bed at 7:30 EDT. More anxiety! I could not tell that she was distressed, but she is very difficult to understand. She rattles on in what sounds like complete mumbled sentences. I could hear Sarah’s voice indistinctly in the background along with a lot of other unidentifiable noise. “Mommy?” I asked Natalie, hoping that she might pass off the phone.

This was followed by more streams of undecipherable talking with the word mommy occasionally thrown in. Leroy had just gone to bed because he was tired, but he got on the phone too. At one point I thought I heard someone vomiting, but I might have manufactured that possibility as I was trying to imagine why there was so much noise and why this girl was on the phone with me and not sleeping. Was someone sick? How did she even call me? But I do know that can happen accidently. Leroy tried asking a couple questions and got the same result that I got. Then there was the noise of lots of buttons being pushed on the phone. I thought I heard five year old Lexi. “Lexi,” I called hoping I might be on speaker I could talk to her.

Leroy and I started having a conversation with each other. “What do you think is going on? What should we do?”

We knew Stephen was out of town so it was no good to call him. Then after a total of eight minutes there was more button pushing and the phone was hung up.

“We had better call back to see if Sarah answers,” Leroy said.

Luckily Sarah answered after a couple rings. “We are in the emergency room,” she said rather matter of fact, “Natalie did not hold my hand when we were ready to cross the street. (“Oh no, she was hit by a car!” I thought. “But she sounded ok.”)

“I grabbed her and her elbow went out of joint.” Sarah said. “She is ok now, but it took a bit to get it back in.”

Not long after that Sarah said, “I have to go,” and hung up.

On Facebook this morning I found out that Natalie has nursemaid’s elbow.

After all this excitement, it took Leroy and I quite a while to get to sleep even though we were no longer concerned. I suppose it was all that adrenalin running through our bodies with nowhere to go.

Paula