After a long hiatus, with many neglected opportunities for me to write about our daily events, I am finally back to writing a blog post. This one just couldn't be left to fade in our memories and had to be written down so here I am writing about our trip up north last week.
We spent the better part of last week at a cabin on a lake in Alexandria, MN. It was a nice, quiet place, which plenty of room for the family and Ken and Cheri. Abby even got her own laundry room to sleep in which was very much needed after an unsuccessful attempt at having the three kids together in a bedroom.
We spent our days swimming, fishing, reading, napping, playing and boating and the kids had a great time. They loved the water and the sand, although they mostly spent their time "swimming" in about 18 inches of water or less. The only child who would venture out deeper was Matthew. We'd strap him up in his life jacket, position his noodle in front of him and he and I would swim out past the dock and boat into a little deeper water where there weren't weeds (yuck, I hate hate hate weeds on my legs when swimming). So we had done that a few times and Matthew just loved it. He would laugh, kick and basically frolic about in the water.
So Thursday afternoon we were enjoying a nice day and swimming a lot. Matthew and I had already swam out in the deeper water a few times, and I decided that I wanted to go out some more. I was planning on maybe swimming a bit more for exercise, but Matthew wanted to join me, so we got in the water an headed out. After we were about 20 feet from shore, Matthew (who was behind me), started screaming, "A crab bit my foot! Ahhhh! It hurts! A crab bit my foot! It hurts, it hurts!" I wasn't sure what was going on and though maybe he was startled by a patch of weeds or something, but he was screaming and crying so it seemed to be more than just being scared by weeds. I swam back to him and pulled him to shore and when I picked him up, I noticed his foot was indeed dripping with blood and covered in a few cuts and scratches.
He continued screaming, "It hurts, it hurts! The crab bit my foot! It had 95 claws! It hurts, it hurts!" which was accompanied by extreme crying. We got him on a towel and wrapped his foot in a clean diaper which happened to be handy for when Abby was done swimming, and had a chance to look at what happened to his foot. He had five cuts, four on the top of his foot and a deep, about 1" gash on the bottom of his foot. The cuts on top weren't bleeding immensely, and two were mostly just scratches, but the bottom one was a gusher. The cuts on top were roughly in a V arrangement, from his toes, to one at the top of his foot where it joins the leg and the bottom cut was about in the middle.
We went through possibilities...did he cut it on something in the water that we couldn't see? The water was murky and you couldn't see much past 18" deep. But we had swam past that area plenty of times and never had a problem. Did he cut it on the boat ramp or the dock? Nope, he was way to far away from them...like at least 6-8 feet away....Hmmm, in spite of the improbability, based on all the evidence of the cuts, the circumstances (murky water, by weeds) and so on, we finally came to the conclusion that he was bit by a big fish. A fish with a mouth big enough the leave cuts on the top and bottom of his foot and big enough to leave cuts across his foot from his toes to nearly his leg. In other words, a really big fish.
We covered Matthew's cuts in neosporin and bandaged him up, then wrapped his foot in athletic tape to hold the bandaids in place. He hobbled about for a few hours, but was pretty much back to himself in a day or so. And now his bandages are gone and there are just a few scabbed over cuts on his foot to remind us and him of his swimming ordeal.
After talking to my dad about it, Dad said that Matthew was lucky that the fish let go as they often grip onto their prey very tightly. I told Matthew this information to which he replied, "It didn't let go, I fought it off." That's my boy. So ended our vacation. I don't know if my kids (or even me) will be swimming in a lake for a long time.
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