Attack of the bees

It will go down in Brown family history: The night the kids got attacked by bees. 

I worry about a lot of things and I have considered numerous and various disasters, diseases, and calamities that probably never occur to the average (less neurotic) person, but it has never occurred to me to worry about my kids getting attacked by bees. 

I guess it should have. 

We were with several other families enjoying fellowship and ice cream when a large group of the kids decided to head to a small patch of woods to climb trees. A few minutes later we heard panicked screams coming from the treeline. Unable to see what was going on, several parents took off running as the screaming got louder and more panicked. No one appeared bloody or limbless, yet all the kids were still panicked and still screaming. I wasn't close enough at first to see it, but another mom came running back and reported it was bees and we needed to stay back, which I fully intended to do...until Kevin appeared out of the woods with another Dad and a half naked Cambel who was writhing and screaming (the screaming just fills the whole story). They were beating Cambel with shirts trying to get those very persistent and angry bees off of him, with little success. Meanwhile Oliver was off to the side with no one to help him and he was also screaming and also being stung by bees. So I ran to him and started stripping him down while another guy who was there helped me beat the bees off with a shirt. Momentarily the bizarreness of the situation distracted me and I started laughing at how ridiculous we must have looked to a clueless bystander: naked screaming kids, wildly thrashing around while seemingly sane adults beat them with shirts. It was so weird, but the poor boys were in so much pain and it wasn't really time to make light of the whole situation quite yet. 

We finally got all the kids back inside the house where they all just kept screaming because they were terrified and because those bee stings really hurt. Unfortunately lots of the bees came inside with us. So picture with me the scene: about 15 kids, all screaming, inside a small living room, bees flying around and all available adults either trying in vain to comfort the screaming kids or kill the bees. It was total chaos as you might imagine. 

It took us awhile to get things calmed down and hear what had happened (Oliver had stepped in a nest of ground bees) and then get all our terrified kids loaded up in our car. When we got home we counted the stings and Cambel had between 20 and 30, which after a call to my sister Anne and our pediatrician, landed us in the ER with both boys to be sure their systems could handle all that venom from all these stings. So if you are still following along here, we went from fun family night with friends, to screaming chaos, to fighting off bees with naked kids, to the ER. As if I needed further confirmation that life is mostly completely unpredictable and bizarre. 

In the end the boys were fine (and Ada was only stung once), but poor Cambel suffered through some very miserable days. He swelled up and itched like crazy and finally needed a round of steroids to help him recover. And Cambel on steroids is just about as interesting as getting attacked by bees, but that is for another post...

 Waiting at the ER. I had given the boys Benadryl and Oliver was passed out, waking just in time to get his vitals checked. 

Our poor survivor of the bee attack. We kept telling him it was going to be a great story to tell, but he was not amused.