I've been waiting for this to happen.
You see, we regularly allow the kids to jump on our bed. We throw them on the bed. We pick them up and bounce them up and down while they laugh and laugh and then we throw them into the pillows and they laugh some more and beg us to "jump me again!" And so it goes. I have pictures around here somewhere, I'll have to add them later.
The other day I was not allowing Sarah to jump on the bed, but she was up there while I folded some clothes and Kate ran circles around us on the floor. Sarah was in a merry state, giggling and rolling around. I was watching her. She's a great climber and gets herself up and down from spots Kate was never good with at her age. But then...just as I've always worried...she got herself at the furthest most spot on the bed away from me. She fell backwards onto the throw pillow on top of the regular pillows. She teetered for a moment and I watched, panicked, too far away to get to her fast enough, as she fell off the extra-tall bed. Just to make things better, she hit her head on the bedside table before finally landing on the floor.
I've seen babies fall in alarming ways often enough now to know there's always a pause for absorption before the screaming commences. "Did she fall down?" Kate asked in that moment. Then Sarah screamed. The worst part of this sort of thing is that she clearly knew it was all my fault. I rushed to her. Picked her up, checking for blood (none) or bumps (miraculously, none) and hugged her. She rejected me outright, instead throwing herself into the arms of her concerned daddy. That was probably a good 30 points off her verbal SAT score, right there.
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5 comments:
Poor kid! That'll probably change her view of how much fun jumping on beds is...
Unfortunately, unless there are stitches (like those in the eyebrows of my sister and both of my sons), I don't feel right awarding points for just letting your kids jump on the beds, even when bumping heads is involved.
I'll sleep on it, though. I might think differently tomorrow, when I'm not fresh home from a hockey game in which there were, disappointingly, no fights.
Aw, at age 4 months, WME Karen had a cracked skull thanks to her sucking a toe, making herself into a ball, and rolling past me onto the floor while my back was turned. Didn't bother her SAT a bit.. just made her a little strange. We still love her! You can't get many WME points w/out blood at least!
Yeah, and you clearly feel bad about it.
At least her math SATs are still intact. That gets a girl farther anyway.
I remember when I was 4 months old I was laying some fuse cable to an incendiary scatter bomb, over in the Nam. My buddy, Ralph, was just 3 months old and fresh from Ft Huggie. Ralph was jumping up and down on the scatter bomb and I was trying to get him to cut it out before something went way wrong. I remember somebody was endlessly replaying "Umbrella Man" by the Partridge family on a cheap little tape recorder, and there was an eerie pleasantness about it that just wasn't quite right. What finally worked getting Ralph off that scatter bomb was a pack of Pall Malls I swiped in a bar from a sleeping French infant from the French infantry. Ralph got off the bomb, we blew the bridge, and had a smoke.
Maybe try that next time.
Oh poor kid. I remember singing that song to my son's.
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Jillian
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