First burn

Diana and I were comparing notes today, and discovered that we both took the remarkably stupid action as young children of putting our hands on hot electric stoves. I don't know why kids would do something like that, and by the way, I remember it vividly. That's not a memory I have ever been able to forget.

Simon had his first burn today, which I'm campaigning for parent of the year on, because I probably should have seen this coming. Generally speaking, we want the kid to learn how to do stuff and be self-sufficient, so today we helped him load a pan in the oven with some french fries. All went well getting them in. All went well getting them out, too. Then I encouraged him to dump the fries on to a plate, and that's where things went horribly wrong.

First, a little background. Simon has horrible situational awareness. Try as we might, it doesn't seem like a skill that we can teach him. It's part of the reason that he spent the better part of his first six or seven years finding new and inventive ways of hitting me in the balls. He often does things that cause spills, things to break or other things that hurt one of us. He immediately follows the event with, "It was an accident," but he's just not good at accident prevention.

Anyway, he lifts the hot tray, with oven mitts, and tilts it away from him. I'm behind him, so I don't entirely see what he's doing, but he tags the underside of his chin with the tray. He quickly puts down the tray, looks at me with the most panicked eyes possible, and bursts into screams and tears. I look, and I can see the skin peeled back where he hit it. The screams are not good. Eventually we get him calmed down enough that I can hold a bag of ice under his chin. Diana uses the video call doctor thing we get through our insurance ($10 beats an urgent care visit), and the doctor is able to basically see the damage and prescribe a cream to put on it. With some instruction about care, we're off in 15 minutes and the prescription is available within an hour or so.

We went on with our day after that, but of course I feel terrible. He didn't do the ridiculous thing we did as kids, he's just kind of clumsy. How he can have such poor situational awareness but master Portal is beyond me.