The first week of summer is done and gone and we’re already halfway into the next. It feels like Team Hokama has barely survived so far. We started out tired, having returned from a three-day weekend trip to Sacramento celebrating Great Grandpa Vic’s 80th birthday. This seemed okay since hey, it’s summer(!), and there will be plenty of time to rest and play, right? Not so.

Last Tuesday afternoon (June 17), while Keana and Sarah were at Keana’s physical therapy appointment—yes, a couple more weeks before her sprained knee is back to normal—I was on a phone call and I heard Maia and Aliya busy playing. They can be quite the dynamic duo, busying themselves all over the house with this or that, and I didn’t think anything of their little chatter until I hear a BANG, CRASH, and Maia screams, “Papa! Papa! Help! It Hurts!” I quickly got off the phone and found Maia on the floor of the laundry room, on her back, one shoulder in the cat water dish. Aliya was standing by the dryer, door open. I tried to get her to tell me where it hurt amidst the sobs, but it was impossible. At that moment, she didn’t know what had happened, she was just in pain.

Eventually she calmed down but on and off for the next couple hours she would complain about the pain in her arm and would start crying. We had Grandma Jennie (who’s a nurse) come over and check her out after dinner, but it was hard to say for sure if anything serious was going on. So Sarah made the executive decision to just take her to the ER at Children’s. It’s a good thing she did, because poor little Maia had broken her right arm in two places: the bone above the elbow was fractured, and a bone in her forearm had a fracture that made it look bowed in the x-ray. The next day, Wednesday, she got her purple cast.

In the midst of all this, we’ve tried to keep this machine running, especially because Wednesday was Aliya’s fourth birthday. Needless to say, it was a quiet birthday at home, but I think she still had fun celebrating. (Plus she had already had an early birthday at Grandma Linda’s in Sacramento that was pretty special.) Of course every birthday is special and even if your sister breaks her arm, you still deserve a little celebration, so we did our best. We had also planned to have a party with her friends last Saturday, but with the lack of sleep and the stress of the week, we just couldn’t get that together. We did have a nice little celebration at Grandma Jennie’s house though, with Tia and cousins Olivia and Emile, so it was still something fun and out of the ordinary for our favorite third child.

And to add to the excitement, during lunch at Grandma Jennie’s, Maia’s mouth started bleeding because her front tooth, which had been loose, got even looser. So upon request, I pulled it out. Never a dull moment, for sure.

And now we’re in week two of summer. It’s hard to imagine that we could have a week quite like last, but if there’s anything that we’ve learned as parents, it’s that there are many, many things out of our control, and we just have to be ready to adjust and take things as they come.