Embarrassing moments

[Lynnie]

I've only broken a toe. I was eight years old, and was (foolishly) swinging back and forth on a kitchen cabinet door. The door broke off its hinges and the bottom edge of it landed right on my toe. It's still slightly crooked to this day.

I didn't break it, but I messed my elbow up when I was 12. I took a running start before jumping over a fence on a playground, and didn't jump high enough. My foot caught the fence and I crashed into the ground- right on my elbow. I had it in a sling for two weeks. And although no bone was broken, I messed the cartilage up because when looking at my elbows side by side now, you can clearly see they don't match. And whenever cold/wet weather is on its way, I can feel it coming in that elbow.

Eh hem, we're getting off topic, sorry.

Now for an EM of not mine, but my mother's. Once when we were at the airport, my brother, mother and I were waiting at the gate so we could watch my aunt's plane take off (this is pre-9/11). Now, for many years my bro always wore baseball caps, and I came up with a way to distract him when he was irritating me- grab the cap off his head and fling it as far as I could in the opposite direction. He'd always stop bugging me and take off to retrieve his cap. Always worked like a charm. Anyway, this day at the airport, my goofy bro was bugging my mom and I. Mom had caught on to my little trick, and she had done it a few times herself. So she grabbed his cap off his head and flung it as hard as she could. There was a middle aged man sitting in one of the seats near by, reading a newspaper, minding his own business. And suddenly this hat comes flying toward him, crashes into his paper, tears it out of his hand, and then lands in his lap. He looks over to where the hat had come from, and sees two kids suddenly crack up something fierce, and their mother red in the face from devastating embarrassment. She goes over and apologizes, he hands her the hat, and then she comes back to where we're still busting our guts, and to this day, I have still never seen my mother's face so red. Now days, all it takes is one of us to say "Remember when Mommy threw the hat at the man?" and the next 10 or so minutes are easily filled with fits of laughter. And she still blushes at the memory.

To add to the story, I entered it in a radio contest for Mother's Day a few years later, it was read on the air, and my mother won a month's worth of free maid service.

My mother has since learned to always look where you're flinging a hat before flinging it.