We made it 14 years without a cast!

Our oldest daughter is 14 (made it 14 years without a cast on any of our kids!), but this smiley faced girl is our 10 year old.  She got to go skating for the first time with a friend of hers on Sunday and towards the end had one big fall.  We thought her wrist just had a bad sprain with some swelling - there wasn't any bruising and she could wiggle her fingers without a lot of pain. We were wrong.   

We ended up taking her to the doctor.  He said he was 95% sure she had a fracture and sent her to get x-rays.  She had two fractures - one in her ulna and one in her radius.  One of the fractures goes up into her growth plate so they had to put the cast up over her elbow to help it heal even better.  

On top of all this, my sweet girl has poison ivy - on her face!  That's the other reason we took her to the doctor.  You can't see it in the picture because the swelling is already starting to go down, but the redness and swelling from the poison ivy was so bad that she could hardly see out of one of her eyes.  Even half of her nose was swollen.  We are so thankful that the swelling is almost completely gone now!

As you can see in the picture, Laurel isn't a pink or purple kind-of girl - she's a green one!  When she was younger we always called her froggy - she had and still has one big frog hop!  Because her favorite color is green, she picked the green tape for her cast.  Then she found out they have glow-in-the dark tape - boy, was she excited!  She has to keep this cast on for three weeks, then she gets a shorter cast on that is below her elbow.  That one is going to be the glow-in-the dark color, and she is already planning a camp out :)

Laurel is a funny girl - she can make you laugh and laugh.  While she was getting the cast on she asked the doctor what the part of her arm was called that she hurt.  He said it was called her forearm.  And she said, "But I don't have four arms!"  He laughed and explained to her the difference in spelling.  Too funny.

On an adoption note:  we are still waiting for our I800a approval from USCIS.  I put in a call today to see if they needed anything else but had to leave a message.  We also need to get our medicals updated, which we are working on tomorrow.  I thought we could just get our regular doctor to fill out a medical form but as it turns out we need all new testing done for TB/HIV/VD and HEPB/C.  We go to one clinic to get the testing done for the TB.  We go to a completely different clinic for the other tests...

To all those who are in the process of adopting - if your insurance doesn't cover you for HIV, VD and HEP B/C testing try seeing if you have a local clinic that tests for sexually transmitted diseases - it's A LOT cheaper (ours is like $15.00 total!) than getting it done at your local doctor's office, and it can be a little eye opening watching the videos they like to play at the clinic (at least our local clinic here in Indy plays them) :0

Karen