The Bee's Knee

We were digging a trench in front of the volcano when it happened. The waves had been getting progressively closer to our play area, and while the hole we were working on had a pretty good wall in front of it, aside from a skimpy little moat the volcano was vulnerable. Kiernan wanted to help with the trench digging, so we were working on that together.

Suddenly Kiernan said, "Ouch!" He lifted up his knee, surprised. We both saw it at the same time. A little bee in the impression his knee had left.

"What was that?" Kiernan said, though I'm sure he knew.

"A bee, buddy. You just got your first bee sting," I replied, forcing a calm onto my voice that I did not feel. This calm didn't immediately pan out as Kiernan began crying in a high-pitched panicked cry.

I kept my calm as best I could, moving him to the blanket so that I could examine his knee. Wendy has spoken of being pretty severely allergic to bee stings for as long as I've known her, so this came to mind immediately. But what also came to mind was the time she stepped on a bee when she was pregnant.

Nothing happened, remember? I told myself, silently. Her foot got a little swollen and that's all. Calm down.

I wiped away the sand and tried to determine if the stinger was still there. Couldn't find it. Kiernan was still howling, but I could feel him calming down. "It hurts! It hurts!"

"Let's put some ice on it," I said, reaching into the cooler. "What do you think?"

"Yes." Calmer.

First I pulled out the blue ice pack thingy and put that on his knee. All that did was stain a bit of his knee blue, because the thing had a hole in it. I ditched it in favor of an actual ice cube which I wrapped in a paper towel. I rubbed that on his knee for a bit, then we looked at the sting site again. Just a little swollen. Like a mosquito bite.

A few more tears. Just a few. A few more minutes of ice. Laughter. Then it was back into the hole. The picture at the top of this post was taken probably five minutes after the incident.

Later he would proudly tell his mother about the whole thing on the phone.

For my part I took a bit longer to relax inside. I asked him a few times how he felt, how his knee felt and how his throat felt. Why? I don't know. I guess I had some idea that this question would help me determine if we were headed for anaphylactic shock or something. What I would have done if this turned out to be the case, I have no idea.

The thought that did hit me, when I felt most tense, was how utterly unhelpful that bromide about more people dying from bee stings than from shark attacks is. It seems I've read that a lot lately, as Kiernan has also been interested in sharks and just about every book about sharks mentions it. It came to me then that this should hardly be a comforting thought, even, ironically enough, fifteen feet from the Pacific Ocean.

In the end we had to worry about neither sharks nor bees. I do wonder, however, whether this will prove to make Kiernan less bee-phobic, or more.

I suppose we shall see.

Sand Before Time

Kiernan and I spent Sunday together at the beach, finding a way to get our minds off of the fact that Wendy was flying to Baltimore for work for a couple of days. There's probably a couple of pictures better than this one for starting off a post about the beach, but I just love the look on the face of that seagull behind Kiernan.

That bird reminds me of a bird from a trip we took to the beach last year. I can't find the post or I'd link to it, but the seagull during that visit grabbed Kiernan's fish toy and tried to fly away with it. Kiernan screamed and I chased the seagull until the bird dropped the toy.

During this trip we were keenly aware of the ever-present birds because Kiernan's precious dinosaurs were along for the trip. There was no way we were going to let one of those nutty birds abscond with one of the dinosaurs. No way.

If you look carefully at these pictures you will see a couple of things. You'll see the dinosaurs, of course. And you'll see Kiernan standing in a big hole.

This is the first time we have taken the dinosaurs to the beach. Basically that's because this is the first opportunity. Kiernan is crazy about dinosaurs right now. Crazy about them. And he has a ton of them. So, naturally, he wanted to bring them to the beach. I told him to choose which dinos came with us carefully. None with moving parts and certainly none with batteries should come along. He chose wisely, selecting a modest group of fifteen for the trip.

As for the big hole, well that has become a staple of our trips to the beach. Last year I would start to build a castle and then dig a hole. Kiernan would destroy the castle and jump in the hole. This year I made a volcano the dinosaurs could climb and then dug the hole. Kiernan did not destroy the volcano. Progress. Maturity.

The hole, as usual, attracted plenty of attention from other beach goers. The dinosaurs did too. Especially from two groups. Toddler boys and fathers. The toddler boys would slow down as they walked by the scene of the dinosaurs on the sand volcano. Their jaws would drop. Kiernan would ask, "Why is he looking at my dinosaurs?" The dads would just smile. One of them said, "Wow. What a cool prehistoric scene!"

I took plenty of pictures of the dinos. Here's my favorite. Dilophosaurus on the volcano.


Shortly after I took this picture we experienced a first. A little scary, but we weathered it. What was it? Kiernan's first bee sting.


I'll talk about that more in the second part of this post.