Aubrey: "My Life is Ruined!"

As many of you know, life with my daughter can be pretty dramatic from time to time. She frequently makes extreme statements like, "you never let me..." or "I always have to..." or things like, "my life is ruined!" to let us know that the life of a seven year old is, so hard and awful. Oh, the agony. I distinctly remember a time when she was probably only two or three and she yelled to Chad and I from her room, "you just don't understand about little girls!!!!" I have half a mind to compile all these statements into a book and then give them to her when she becomes a mother, just so she can prepare herself.

But, back to last Thursday... She has become quite the little bus rider since starting at her new school. We have virtually no issues getting on and off the bus. Her bus driver, Ms. C is super nice, has all her teeth, and greets us with a wave every morning and afternoon. It's simple and it's quite wonderful, really, not having to get in the car every morning and drive her to school and then interrupt Andrew's nap in the afternoon to go get her. It had been nothing short of a great experience. Up until last Thursday. And really, this has very little to do with the bus except that this experience she had happened right after getting off the bus in the afternoon.

So, this is what happened: she got off the bus, came down the steps and gave me a hug. Typical routine. Andrew, who is sitting in the stroller, several feet away from us and the busy street, is waiting for his big sister. She turns from me and throws herself in his direction down the driveway. As she's running toward him, the sweater tied around her waist starts slipping down. Just as I was about to say, "hey Aubs, grab your sweater before you fall!" she trips on the sweater at her feet and goes face first into the driveway. Evidently, she did try to catch herself on the way down but only succeeded in scraping the skin off every single knuckle on both hands. Ouch. It was very, very sad. It is a mental image that I have not yet been able to erase. So sad. She popped back up and I grabbed her and she was crying, and crying, and rightly so, it looked horrible. She asked, "am I bleeding???" all horrified, and I told her yes, and we went into the house to clean her up. When she saw herself in the mirror, she was aghast, and kept exclaiming, over and over again, "I look horrid!" or "I look horrible!/awful!/terrible!/fill in the blank!" And I didn't disagree. There was a lot of blood on her cute little face. And it looked like it hurt. But we got it all cleaned up, and bandaids on her forehead and all her knuckles, (It was a good thing she got a box of Hello Kitty bandaids in her stocking for Christmas-- they were half gone after this fix up job). And I naively thought that would be the end of it. Oh no. I was wrong. No longer is she the girl that can be made all better by a few bandaids and hugs and kisses. No. She is 7. A very melodramatic 7. The next THREE HOURS, count them, 1, 2, 3, hours, were filled with dramatic crying fits, and other exclamations, including, "my life is ruined!" At one point I was holding her, as she enumerated all the people she was going to have to call to tell that at the young age of 7, her life was a wreck... dad, of course, both grandmas made the list, as did the busdriver, and her primary teacher. Even the bishop. It was like that talk in General Conference a while back, she wanted to tell everyone, "hope ya know I had a hard time." Later on, when we did a bandaid adjustment, I was trying to console her and she said, obviously disappointed by my waning sympathy and patience, "but MOM! I almost died!!!!! I had to assure her, no, it was a scary and bad experience, and you did bleed quite a bit, but you didn't almost die. But to her, this was the worst possible thing she has experienced so far in her life. It literally took about three hours for her to wind down.

Fortunately, we're now a week later, and although we've still had some drama over it, mostly, from answering the question, "what happened to your face?????" the face and the life seem to be healing nicely. So I don't actually think her life has been ruined after all. Thank goodness.