Moving Day & Olivia's stitches!

So after a month in a hotel, we finally got the keys to our little house! Even though we are leasing we still consider this our FIRST house (we are going on 10 years of marriage....all in an apartment, so it counts), and are very excited!  This excitement soon turned into panic after we walked in and realized the old tenants didn't clean. We also learned that there were A LOT of things broken, and after several calls to our real-estate agency--we realized that our property was being overseen by one of those Realtor's that doesn't return phone calls and plays hookie for up to 5 days at a time.

This was in conjunction with the fact that our moving company managed to showed up 8 hours late (we were at the house at 8:00am waiting for them--got the kids up at 6:00am to check out of the hotel and get over there in time). We couldn't leave the house because they were always "30 minutes away" and with no food or furniture we started to have a lot of grumpy kids and nothing to do.

When the movers did come (5:00pm) we had our whole ward waiting around to help (ok only 10 people--but we had been turning people away all day since there was nothing to do). They set up the beds and unpacked the kitchen (well most of the kitchen, suddenly we realized about 1/4th of our things were missing--the movers left some boxes in Sydney--oops! Which they didn't get delivered until the following week) It was ok but most the boxes left were kitchen boxes, so we were missing things like, knives, spatulas, can openers etc...

Anyway,  unpacking was going really well until we all heard a SCREAM and Olivia came hoping into the house. She had climbed up a rusty basket ball pole (there was all sorts of rubbish left in the yard by the old tenants) and slide down on a fat screw that sliced open her thigh. The fat was dripping out and with no clue where a towel or band-aid could be Stan picked her up and someone from church drove us over to the ER (because we didn't have the faintest idea where one was).

We stayed at the ER until 1:00am. They were so full they were turning away ambulances. Olivia's cut was roughly 6 - 7 inches long and 2 inches deep. Compared to the other patients she wasn't a priority so we had to play the waiting game. They gave her some tylenol and some numbing cream so they could give her stitches but the cut was so deep that the cream was not effective. With no other options, they decided to knock her out with some sleeping gas (much to my relief) and when she woke up she had 5 stitches.

This picture looks like a close up of someones knee...but that is her butt...just to put it in perspective!

NOW--I was reading my friends blog in the USA. Her kid hit his head on a church pew and he got 5 stitches. The cut is TINY and I was thinking to myself..."why does Olivia have 5 Frankenstein stitches and this kid has 5 tiny stitches?" I could easily fit 5 American stitches in-between Olivia's Australian stitches.

10-14 days later Olivia was supposed to get her stitches out BUT none of the GP's wanted to touch them because it was sevearly infected and if we pulled them out the cut was sure to split open. They prescribed some antibiotics, and took the stitches out while holding their breath.  If you leave stitches in too long your scar is bigger, if you take them out too soon- the cut opens up. Olivia had her's in the maximum number of days so it had to come out and guess what.....It broke open! They did a patch job with 8 butterfly band-aids and then put a waterproof covering over that and said come back in 10-14 MORE Days.

We just took the bandages off yesterday and with the antibiotics the scar is better BUT she now has a fankenstien scar!  DO YOU SEE THE LINES? So seriously, am I just over reacting because this is the first time we have had stitches on our own (i.e.not for an operation)--or were these really crappy stitches? (click on the pictures to zoom in! Comments welcome!