eyeThomas was helping me wire up the new room we’re finishing in the basement.  At first, when I had to pound a bunch of work boxes into the studs, he wasn’t able to help much; he whacked in a couple of nails but it took him quite a long time, so he was mostly helping me by handing me tools and such.

So for a while, he was off by himself playing with some of the tools, including a flathead screwdriver.  I’m not sure exactly what he was doing; at one point he was hitting the screwdriver with a hammer, and doing some other things.  When it happened, he was prying at something as well, and then…

SNAP!

He immediately started to cry, and as I turned around I saw him holding his hand over his left eye.  When the screwdriver gave way, it snapped up and cut into the skin above his eye, maybe two millimeters from the eye itself.  Obviously, he was hurt and afraid, but quickly protested that he was fine; that he was “A-OK”.  I got him to the bathroom where I could carefully clean the cut and look at his eye, but then he saw the blood in the mirror and freaked out.

The crying brought Robin down to investigate.  She was very upset to see the injury, which upset Thomas even more, and in the end it took quite a while to get him calmed down.  The irony was that the injury was clean and the bleeding easily stopped, and his vision was not affected at all; it was scary, but not major.

So in the philosophy of “get right back on the horse”, I brought him back into the new room to help some more, this time with his eye protection on the whole time.  He helped cut wire, drill holes through the studs, pull cable, and we traced out all the electricity and how the switches were going to work.  In the end he stayed in with me, hammering some nails into scrap lumber (no, he didn’t smash any fingers) so I think we avoided tool-phobia.

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