How not to play with your kids Two weeks ago: I thought I'd be a good dad and skip the workout so I could go in the kids gym at the Y and play with my kids. Quotidian bad judgement found me trying a move that I saw once performed by a professional Chinese acrobats. I told Maggie to bend over, reach her hands between her legs past her ankles. With several parents and YMCA employees as witnesses, I grabbed her hands and tugged, expecting to pull off a marvelous flip and land her on her feet. Instead, I ended up causing her to do an accelerated face plant into the thin exercise mat. That precipitated a two hour crying jag in which she could not use her right arm. The crying subsided after some children's ibuprofen and after Maggie learned to dress herself with one hand, we forgot about it until last weekend when my mother-in-law showed up.
"Who fractured Maggie's clavicle?", she asked upon examining her. I got to do a rendition of the scene, and even bent over into the pose that Maggie was in, hoping Carol wouldn't grab my hands and pull to see if she could at least do some soft tissue damage.
She really wasn't mad at all. In fact, she is in a very accepting phase of her life right now, having just survived cancer. Besides, a fractured clavicle is very common for kids and her own son had one when he was 4. The treatment is that the kid wears a sling for the first 24 hours and gets some ibuprofen. Since we missed the time for the sling by about 2 weeks, there was no treatment at all for us. As long as you don't pull the same crap again, it heals by itself. It leaves a bump on the collar bone for a long while. If the kid's arm feels numb or tingly, all bets are off, however.
9:06:44 PM 
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