Bingo for Kids Injuries

It seems like my kids get injured a lot. Then again, with a lot of kids it may be that it just seems that way because at any given time someone is likely to have some sort of injury.

Certainly, with six boys who play outside regularly and who aren’t what anyone would call low on energy there are bonks, bruises and skinned knees constantly. I’m not sure I’d even call those injuries. As far as more serious injuries we’ve been blessed with relatively few - especially given the number of bones our kids collectively have to break (1,442 if you’re wondering).

To date none of them have broken a bone. We’ve had stitches and a separated shoulder and the ingested penny incident but we’ve largely been spared trips to the ER.

This whole kid injury conversation came up because, in the summer after getting back from vacation, a coworker asked if any of the kids got injured. I somewhat defensively asked if I was the type of parent who seemed to have kids who were accident and/or injury prone. She said I had mentioned a few times where a kid was injured when we were running errands so she was just checking in after the vacation. Man, you let a kid walk into a shopping cart handle one time and you’re marked for life.

I said there had been no injuries. And then added I didn’t count the splinter the one boy got or any sunburns or blisters as injuries. She thought those counted. She also said she had seen some Christmas Bingo cards for family get togethers and suggested I make a kid injury bingo card based on injuries we sustained throughout the year.

I joked we didn’t have a big enough family to fill a bingo card with injuries. But if all our kids’ cousins were together…

We won’t all be together on Christmas but next summer we will and I’m thinking I should give this a go. It would work like the ice breaker bingo games where you have a card with various statements on it and you have to find a person that fits the description (name starts with a B, flew on a plane this month, has lived abroad, etc).

However, in our kid injury bingo game you would only be asking questions to the 23 cousins and the spaces would have statements like, has broken an arm, has had a concussion, has had stitches, has been to the ER more than once, has worn an eye patch, etc.

Something tells me there would be more than one person calling bingo at the same time. However, I have to say, the more I think about it the more I like the idea of this Kid Injury Bingo Game. And patent pending.