Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Child Rearing – one concussion at a time

Gwen fell down the stairs yesterday afternoon. Now it was just 3 stairs that lead down to a landing and the back door, and thankfully she didn’t then take another roll and proceed down 9 more stairs and end up on the concrete floor in the basement. She’s completely fine and doesn’t even have a bruise. My first reaction upon hearing the news was obviously – “My God, is she alright?” and my second reaction was, Thank God it didn’t happen when I was responsible for her. I’m just happy in the knowledge that her worst tumble was Matt’s fault. That’s what makes for a healthy marriage – honesty.

This kid has taken more tumbles than I’d like to admit in her short lifetime and most of them happened when I was with her. She’s fallen off the couch three times (after the 1st time you’d think I would have just stopped putting her on the couch), just last week I fell asleep with her in the recliner and woke up at 1 a.m. to her screaming and realized that she had rolled down my legs and onto the floor, and now the stair incident. We’d even installed the safety gate across the stairs last week to avoid just such a situation but it wasn’t properly latched and it swings open and closed and Matt’s theory is that either Aaron or the dog or perhaps Gwen herself opened it before this latest Child Services Inquiry- worthy accident happened.

So I was thinking that our parenting skills were really getting lax this second time around because I didn’t recall Aaron having quite so many unhappy meetings with the floor. Matt was quick to remind me though that Aaron fell off the couch once, off the side of the recliner once when I fell asleep with him, and he fell off the bed, which was quite traumatic. I still hear that thud in my nightmares. He also got a lovely deep scratch, mere millimeters from his eyeball when he was 2 months old and the cat went streaking across the couch and used his face like a runner’s starting block.

It’s times like these when I find myself repeating the parent’s child safety motto. “What doesn’t kill them, makes them stronger”.

1 comment:

Got Grammer said...

Hey didn't Matt toss Aaron across the room into the ottoman's on The fourth. Bruises are only skin deep.