Novato Chainsaw Massacre

Ever since he was little, C has been prone to bloody noses. I'm told that his daddy was that way as a little boy, too. Thin membranes, I guess. It gets worse in the winter, with the heater coming on repeatedly throughout the night, drying the air out. I wash a lot of bloody sheets during the winter.

We've always been pretty casual about the bloody noses - we figured that if we didn't panic, C wouldn't panic when he got one. At pre-school, he'd just grab a handful of tissue and sit quietly till he got the bleeding to stop and he's been great about them in grade school too.

So Saturday morning, it looked like he had a couple of small drops of blood on his face. I asked if he had had a bloody nose during the night and he said no. He hasn't had as many bloody noses recently, and it was a very small amount of blood so I didn't think much about it.

This morning, when I went in to wake him up, I noticed a smallish spot of blood on his pillow case and when I lifted it up to look for more blood, discovered the remains of what had to have been a gigantic gusher. Somehow he managed to bleed between the pillows so that the pillows kept it hidden till this morning. (Now you know how carefully we make the beds around our house. Most days, I feel like I'm doing a good job if I manage to throw the covers up over the pillows so that we don't end up sleeping on a bunch of cat hair.) (It also proves how well we've trained C to be relaxed about blood. When I mentioned it to him, he didn't even bother with opening his eyes to look.)

I'm told by my friend K, who also suffers from bloody noses, that Oxiclean does a good job on blood, both old and new, so I've picked some up to use tonight.

Here's hoping that no one has a need or an opportunity to walk through C's bedroom before I get home. Because really, that bed looks like it was the location of a re-enactment of In Cold Blood.