the good, the bad, and the ugly

Ammon was going to go to week-long scout camp at Camp Bradley near Stanley, Idaho from Monday July 30 to Saturday August 4. He was so excited to go! It would've been the first time he'd gone, now that he's 12, and he was looking forward to going with some of his best friends from another ward in Salmon, too. He packed his scout backpack and was all ready to go early on Monday morning. On Sunday night, the night before he left, we got a phone call saying there'd been a fire that started near Camp Bradley, and that scout camp was cancelled. It was too late to switch to another boy scout camp, so the boys in our troop never got to go. Unfortunately, that fire that started 2 days before he was scheduled to leave has spread and is still burning. Ammon was SO disappointed. He laid around the house for those first 2 days watching the Olympics on TV.  The scoutmaster decided to take the boys in our ward on Tuesday night for an overnighter camp to Wallace Lake instead. Josh went with them, too. They had a good time, but it wasn't the same as what a week-long scout camp would've been. And although they worked on passing off requirements, if Ammon had gone to scout camp, he would've completed several requirements as well as several merit badges. We are hoping that it will work out for him to go next year.

 

On that Saturday, we decided to take Ammon floating down the Salmon River. We've been waiting for years for him to be old enough to take. And since his schedule changed, and we had nothing planned for that afternoon, it worked out really well! He was so happy to go with us, too! We floated from the 11-mile access to the Shoup Bridge, which is a 5-mile stretch of the river. We used innertubes, and it took us about 2 hours. It was a nice, relaxing afternoon!   

When we got home after floating, I asked the boys how things went while we were gone. Micah said "Good. Jonah got stung by a bee." Jonah looked like this:

There are some beehives in the field above our house, and he'd been walking outside in the field with Kanyon and got stung by a bee on his left eyelid. He pulled the stinger out himself while we were gone. We got home about an hour after it had happened, and the swelling was already progressing. I gave him some Benadryl, and rubbed Benadryl cream on his eye several times that evening, and gave him a second dose of oral Benadryl before bedtime. The next morning was Sunday, and I let him stay home from church so that he didn't have to be embarrassed about how his eye looked. I rubbed more cream on it and gave him another oral dosage before we left. And when we got home from church, this is how he looked:

He'd fallen asleep while we were gone, and when we came home, he woke up. His eye looked much worse, and he was acting very strange: he wasn't speaking very coherently and he tripped in the bathroom and laid down in the tub for a while. I decided I needed to take him to the E.R. Josh is allergic to bee stings, and now I knew that Jonah was, too. I convinced Jonah to go because I told him they would just give him medicine that would make the swelling stop, and then he would feel better. We were there for about an hour, and they gave Jonah an oral dose of epinephrine (he was so glad they didn't use the Epi-Pen shot), and put him on some antibiotics. This is what he looked like after we got home from the hospital:

It took several hours before the swelling finally went down, and his eye didn't appear fully normal for 3 more days! He was a good sport about it all, and he was so glad when he finally looked like himself again instead of Quasimoto!