I know that kids get hurt. It's the reality of being a kid. I'm just never prepared for how bad I feel when one of my children is hurting. This past weekend we took the family to the Great Plains Zoo here in Sioux Falls. We make periodic trips to the zoo of course, but this one was anything but normal.

We were well on our way through all of the exhibits, checking out the animals and whatnot. Then we took a little break and went to sit at a picnic table to have some snacks and feed the babies. On our way up to the table, my 3 year-old daughter Ellie took a nasty spill on the sidewalk. She tripped over the edge of the sidewalk from the grass to the concrete. She fell hard too. She drilled her knees, and her elbow. The elbow was the worst. It bled pretty bad too. We had a little first aid kit in the diaper bag, and we tried to clean it up and put some bandaids on. (By the way, it's funny that she always wants to put bandaids on when she doesn't have any injury, but when she's actually bleeding she hates putting them on)

Anyway, I couldn't have felt worse. It's truly amazing how much you feel for your kids when they're hurting. I felt sick to my stomach because my daughter was hurt. So we ended up making our way through the rest of our zoo trip, and she was mostly fine. But after we got home, it was time to check out the wounds and put on new bandages. And that wasn't easy. She didn't want to take them off for anything. We finally convinced her to take them off because we had some antibacterial stuff to put on it.

Then Ellie says, "Is this Neosporin Daddy?" My first reaction was, "How do you know what Neosporin is?" But then I knew it was from all the ads she's seen on the Disney Channel. Chalk another one up to those genius advertising people. Then she says, "It helps owies, and prevents scars." I didn't know she knew the word "prevents" either. I'm really not looking forward to the amount of Neosporin we'll need when my twin boys start running around. I should buy some stock in Johnson & Johnson.