Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Latest Adventure

Ryan's Mac broke last week. He made the trip up to the Mac store by UW to get it repaired. They called him on Saturday to tell him it was ready, at which point we decided our outing for the day would be to all head up there together after Gareth's nap and pick up the computer. As we were leaving I was thinking we'd maybe get dinner while we were up there as well, since by the time we left the apartment it was about 4 pm.

Unbeknownst to us, UW was having their commencement on Saturday. The bus hit the UW region about the same time commencement ended, which meant we got stuck in the incredibly slow traffic that comes with the end of a university graduation ceremony. I was getting rather hungry by the time the bus reached our stop. As was Gareth, so I gave him a couple slices of bread I'd brought for him. Those slices of bread are the likely cause of his tripping (I'm assuming he wasn't paying enough attention to the sidewalk and too much to eating) and cutting up his knee a couple of blocks into our walk from the bus stop to the store. We still had quite a walk ahead of us, made up almost entirely of stairs. (Think the stairs by the RB at BYU, but that amount tripled probably.) Ryan wanted me to just take Gareth home while he went on, which was probably a good idea, but I didn't have anything to clean Gareth up with and decided the fastest way to get him at least a little cleaned up would be to get to the shopping center. So we all went on.

We used a Starbucks bathroom to wipe up Gareth's knee while he screamed and then bought him a treat to try to get his mind off the pain. Somehow during the treat-purchasing process Gareth realized that his finger was hurting as well and we discovered a sliver which I would not be able to remove without a pin. Even his pink doughnut couldn't keep his mind off of the finger pain. By this point I think we'd already given up on getting dinner in the shopping center between commencement and Gareth's injuries. We gave up on making him happy and moved on to the Mac store. Gareth and I waited outside for the five minutes it took Ryan to pick up the computer and then we started the trek home. We managed to make it back up all the stairs and to the bus stop right about the time a bus was due. That bus never came. Neither did the one after it or the next one. We were starting to try to call people to look up another route we could easily get to to get home when, 45 minutes late, a bus finally showed up.

At this point Gareth was hungry, tired, still in pain, and still bleeding, so it was a rough bus ride for all of us. And probably for everyone else on the bus with us. A guy wearing a hat was able to get Gareth to play peek-a-boo with him toward the end of the trip. For some reason, we inherited the hat when the guy got off the bus:


We finally made it home around 9 pm, still needing to clean Gareth up and feed him something before sending him off to bed. We turned on a show for him and gave him his blanket to distract him while I removed the sliver. Then Ryan held him while I cleaned the blood off his knee and applied hydrogen peroxide (which Gareth really hated) to make us feel better about the dirt that I couldn't wash out. Thankfully our neighbor had just purchased some large band-aids, which we told him was a sticker, and he was good as new. I made up a peanut butter sandwich for him and finally got him to eat some of it, even though all he really wanted to do was suck his thumb and hold his blanket.

After getting Gareth to bed Ryan and I discovered that there really isn't anywhere that delivers in our neighborhood, or if they do they were already closed. So we foraged around the kitchen for a hodge-podge dinner of our own. Definitely not the most successful of our outings thus far. But we have the computer back now!

2 comments:

Amy Rose said...

Man, oh man sakes alive, what a trip! I probably might have broken down at some point and cried too!

But hey, not only did you get a fixed mac out of the deal, you came away with a pretty sweet hat too! I love strangers who are kind.

Alanna said...

Wow. I hate days like that. By the end I'm so exhausted and frustrated it's usually all I can do to not sit and cry over the whole thing. This is also why I prefer subways to buses; for whatever reason they seem WAY more reliable. Maybe because they run on a track? So you know it has to pass your stop eventually! A bus could have gone off anywhere!

But I have to agree that that hat is awesome. Keep that for forever, please.