Fast-forward to:

THE NEXT DAY:
My daughter is newly in a cast.
My son has just started drumming lessons.
I would not personally think of combining those two things, but to the kids, the connection was obvious and irresistible.

Somehow, nobody ended up furious.

As if having one kid with a shattered navicular bone were not enough upset, both my kids have managed to get systemic poison oak.  One was hacking a new trail down to the lake with a couple friends with machetes. The other one was just hanging out with the machete crew. These are mountain kids; they KNOW what poison oak looks like. In the end, they figured out that the largest of the vines that they severed and joyously de-barked wasn't ivy after all.  It was a monster branch of poison oak. We have gone from calamine lotion to Benadryl to Kaiser for steroids.

On the face . . . in the cast . . . . oh, dear God. 

And did I mention The Dog?  Sadie has had a quarter-sized bare spot on her side that has recently started to worry her a lot.  A trip to the vet later, we have ruled out mange. And, there were no mast cells.  But it is worrisome when the vet is stumped.

At any rate, this is where we end up:

Chillin' in the Comfy-Cone.

Too many pieces

Last Tuesday (one week ago), my daughter broke her foot in a bad landing from an emergency dismount. Nutmeg may have been stung, or she may have brushed the electric fence, and took off like a shot. Choosing to do the emergency dismount made sense in that situation.

Poor Tessa has been here before.  Or so I thought.  I was expecting a run-of-the-mill fracture, a few weeks in a cast, and back to normal.  But then the podiatrist looked at her x-ray.   And ordered a CT Scan.

(Navicular bone ain't right).

The scan showed that her navicular bone had shattered into several (about five) small pieces. 

After a long discussion, the podiatrist told us that surgery was unlikely to effect a long-term fix on the joint.  There are too many small pieces to pin, and they are deep in the foot in a very difficult location to access surgically. 

I appreciated his candor and his restraint.  The prognosis is that she will likely end up with early arthritis. With or without surgery.  So why suffer the "slice-and-dice?" (Tessa's words).

She is in now in a non-weight-bearing cast for 4 weeks. At that point, they will re-evaluate those crazy bones. They will either want to put her back into a cast or transition the foot into a boot for a few more weeks. 

On the upside, I'm really into knowing the weather.  Hopefully, my arthritic daughter will be able to tell me when a storm is moving in.

All The Jumps

Tessa has been teaching her horse to jump.

They are having a blast.

The thing is, once you start teaching creatures to jump, it can be hard to stop.

She discovered that Sadie likes it too.

And she's good at it.

Tessa can get animals to do almost anything for her, because she turns it all into a game.

Wheee!

 Sometimes there is cheating!

But mostly, there is jumping. For joy.

And, for the Jolly Ball.

Winner.