It has tasted blood

It has been a busy summer thus far (my blogging has suffered for it) but our family does occasionally get to do the family camping excursion once in a while. On one such excursion this summer, we were cleaning breakfast dishes at our leisurely pace when our son asked permission to go play on the merry-go-round at the camp's park. Naturally, we said, "of course".
What we did not understand was that this merry-go-round hadn't had much action yet this year, and it wanted blood.
To give a bit of background here: Every year, our church does an "all-church camp out" and this year, we decided to try out a new campsite for a nice change of scenery. The week before the whole church camped out, our little family unit (all three of us- and the dog, Vern) checked out the campground to see how big it was, how the water tasted etc.
Back to the story:
Our son comes running over to us and said, "I hurt my foot". He wasn't crying or even limping all that much so my first response was to say, "Oh you'll be fine....." and then I said, "OOOhhh! Get your foot up here" (meaning on the picnic table bench), which he dutifully did.
I took off his rope sandal, which provided little to no protection against the vampirous play equipment and washed his foot with my drinking water, which REALLY got the blood flowing!
It wasn't until I told him that he would need stitches that he sounded remotely worried!
So, having no first aid kit, we got out a clean coffee filter and slapped it on the wound and had him put some pressure on it while we took him to the local clinic.
Everything worked out fine. He got 11 stitches in all, and was quite pleased to hear that he would have a handsome scar.
His foot had been under the merry-go-round as it was spinning, and it (the merry-go-round) was very close to the ground, with hard packed gravel all around it (not soft playground sand). A bolt or metal plate from the underside of the thing caught his foot and ripped his flesh back and under the healthy un-ripped flesh further up the foot. The doctor had the challenge of pulling the skin back to it's position and scrapping all the grit and gravel out of the wound (by this time, my son's foot was blissfully numb).
Now the stitches are out, and tonight will be the first baseball game that he'll have played since before the church camp out (in the beginning of July). All is well that ends well.
As my husband says, "Pain is temporary, glory is forever and chicks dig scars".

PS- The picture of the merry-go-round above is not the offending piece of equipment. I feared had I included a picture of it, you would have run away screaming in horror. The pictures of the foot are, however, really my son's foot.