Coupe Icare and a Head Wound, Thankfully Unrelated

Last Saturday, Sept 19th (I'm finally caught up on blogging!) we went to the Coupe Icare festival. It is held on the mountains behind our house and a town down the ways a little. It is a festival of free flight and features hangliders, paragliders, parachuters, ultralights, hot air balloons.. you name it. Our favorite are the parachuters or paraponters. We watch them almost daily come down behind our house, but it's fantastic to see them coming down enmass, doing tricks and decked out in various costumes.

This first one is truly wild. You can't tell by the photo, but this guy was flipping end over end (not merely spinning around) on his way down. It was incredible and scary all at the same time.

These two were amazing as well. They spun around and around in a double helix...

all the way to the ground.

The timing and symmetry was incredible.

Then there are the costumes..

I think this guy was sporting the house from the Disney Pixar movie 'Up'.

An airplane with a parachute. Interesting.

Sky surfer.

And the all-around crazies.

Including.. is that Dumbo?!

An idea of the amount of parachuters coming down at the same time. There were literally 20-30 up on the mountains and as many descending and landing. Probably 50 or so concurrently in the air at the same time all afternoon! Definitely entertaining.

After an afternoon at the Coupe Icare, we came home and ate dinner... and Kevin was playing around with the boys. He threw CJ onto the couch and he somehow landed right in between the cushions in the corner of the couch and split his head open on the wood part back there. Totally ramdom. I decided I wasn't comfortable shaving almost the entire back of his head to butterfly such a large cut... so I headed off to the emergency room. The irony is that we have never had to go to the emergency room in the 7 1/2 years that we have had children. We got to try it out for the first time in another country and another language - perfect! I was wise enough to call a very kind French friend of mine who was willing to come along and help me through it all. It was so nice to have someone tell me where to go and handle all the check-in details. Unfortunately, they didn't allow her to come back with me so I was on my own to talk to the doctor and nurses. I did fine, we spoke a lot of Frenglish, a lot of hand motions and really it wasn't too difficult. I find that within context I understand quite a bit of French. It's the random stuff that gets me.

Back to CJ, he was a champ! He ended up with 5 sutures. After the first 3, the anesthetic apparently wore off or wasn't strong enough, so he felt the last 2 sutures. Those weren't fun for any of us. He really screamed and cried and resisted, but it was almost worse when she tried to numb it more with the needle, so I told her to just finish quickly! He really did great and was quite the trooper.

Here's some pictures of him after we returned home, back on the couch where it all started!

Smile :) Poor guy, he was so wiped out by this time...

Nice goose egg and bandaged head ;)

He woke up the next day (Sunday) and said "It feels fine, it doesn't hurt at all". So we didn't even have to give him any pain meds. Seriously, what amazing bodies we have that heal so quickly!

So we all handled our first and hopefully last emergency here in France just fine. Thanks to my sweet friend Nathalie who made the whole thing quite simple. And CJ, a really brave and tough boy!