On the second day of Christmas. . .

My true love gave himself. . .

an arterial wound in the palm.

(If you have a queasy stomach, carry on elsewhere in blogosphere, because there is about to be a lot of blogging about blood.)

On the morning of the 26th, the day before our three guests were coming from Madonna House, we booked the day off from family functions and busy-ness to get down to brass tacks and get our home ready for guests. I went over to the shelf where I keep my cookbooks in search of a good dessert recipe using the things I had on hand (excellent things: eggs, chocolate, whipping cream, butter, sugar! I was thinking pudding, naturally). I pulled a cookbook down, and CRASH, the entire shelf fell off the wall. This is where I had been hanging my pots and pans, and (sigh) where I stored all my expensive gluten-free flours in glass containers!

Being that we have learned to be paranoid about careful with broken glass, I had to contain the kids in the living room while Patrick courageously swept up the mess. It took a sizeable chunk of the morning, and I wasn't too impressed that all my flour had to be thrown out, and that I had to find a new place to store all the pots in my otherwise crowded kitchen.

We sat down to lunch anyhow, grateful to be back into a more peaceful routine again, and a few minutes after eating, Noah brought Patrick a cute little die-cast John Deere tractor that his aunt gave him, asking if Daddy would open the packaging.

On account of not knowing where my scissors were at that exact moment, Patrick ventured towards the steak knives. I was sitting staring out the window, thinking about Lent of all things (I think my Christmas over-indulgences were making me excited to get back into a disciplined life, which Lent is great for) where I heard a squawk sound and then "Ah! Blood!"

I turned around to see something like that of the Knight in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail film.

"But it's just a flesh wound!"

Blood quickly started spurting everywhere -- the front of all my cabinets, the floor, the countertop, the oven door, even the leftover half of a pizza sitting on the counter.

"Call 911! This seems like a lot of blood!" said Patrick. So the kids and I ran into the next room where I called 911 and listened to Patrick pray Hail Marys through clenched teeth and I tried to will my knees not to completely give out.

We watched 10 minutes later as an ambulance sped past our house. It must have turned around the other way a few minutes later, and sped past us the other direction. Nothing makes you feel more crazy than running into your own driveway and flagging down an ambulance. Meanwhile, I tried to keep Noah out of total hysterics (after our car accident and Isaiah's recent hospital stay, he has gotten to learn the hospitals aren't just fun places where babies are born and your grandparents buy you Timbits like he previously thought).

The paramedics arrived, came in and said "Whoa, that is lot of blood!" So at least I felt a bit vindicated, that I wasn't hallucinating or something.

They checked Patrick's hand, bandaged it up and then took him for a wee ride in the ambulance to the nearest hospital where he got stitches.

I put Isaiah down for his nap, put Noah in the next room with some Play-doh, and embarked on cleaning up the blood everywhere. It made me think of that tragic image of Our Lady mopping up Christ's blood in "The Passion". Except there was obviously less blood. And neither Patrick nor I are especially holy like Christ and His Mother.

Later on he apologized for not thinking clearly and aiming his blood "somewhere more convenient" before I gave him a tea towel with which to apply some pressure on the wound.

Because the first thing you should do after stabbing yourself in the hand with a rather dull steak knife is contemplate how to make this incident less bothersome to your spouse.

How positively selfish of him.