Well… I suppose it had to happen eventually.
As I mentioned in my last post on the topic, our son Dashiell started walking. This is great, but also scary. REALLY. FREAKING. SCARY! It took him ten days to go from a few halting steps to this astonishing fall-recover-fall-recover process (frunning? toddle-jogging? toggling? this must have a name…) that approximates running at least well enough to make him impossible to catch if you’re more than two feet away when he starts doing it!
This milestone arrived while my wife was on her first solo trip since the first trimester of her pregnancy. Her retaking of her self-actualized ways is another wonderful thing, but it meant that my son and I were flying solo for about 8 days, so I was alone when we achieved warp-speed.
We were in the living room when he first did it. I was amazed, and immediately scrambled for the camera to get some video. As I turned back, he gave me a mischievous look, and took off in the opposite direction, directly into the sub-woofer of our speaker system! Needless to say, the speaker was unmoved. The toddler, on the other hand, came out a bit worse for wear!
He bounced off and hit the floor in a split second, at which time he immediately rolled over and started screaming. His right eye was completely obscured with blood, and it was running down his face (the blood, not the eye, you sickos!). I almost literally blacked out from the fear-response this inspired in me. I was quite certain my child had, due to my clearly incompetent supervision, lost his sight. Until he blinked the blood out, and I saw the eye was quite intact, that is…
Still in shock, but no longer quite in a panic, I managed with one hand to simultaneously carry him and apply pressure to the gouge on the orbital bone just to the outside of his right eye, while one-handedly rummaging through first-aid supplies. I got him cleaned and sterilized, with bleeding mostly stopped, in about ten minutes. The screaming (oh god, the screaming!) continued for another thirty, while I anxiously waited for a call-back from the pediatrician’s office. Amazingly, after all that wailing, all at once he just stopped, smiled up at me, and fell asleep!
After seeing a picture and giving me instructions for how to periodically wake him and check for concussion just in case ( a sleep-full night did not follow these events), the doctor pronounced this “nothing to worry about, just the first of many minor injuries.”
I want that to make me feel better. I really do…
[The shiner lasted four days, and at nine, the scar is almost invisible]
“The screaming (oh god, the screaming!) ” You know, you should really stop doing that. It scares the little kids.