"We were just sitting on the couch quietly chatting when we heard a creaking noise." "We leapt off just in time to see it collapse."

Abbie is a climber. When she goes outside, she finds tons of things to climb. There’s the neighbor’s trampoline, over three feet off the ground, that she can climb in and out of* using a stepstool. Or when leaving the trampoline, if that stepstool is unavailable because it’s two inches away from the spot where she’s decided she’s coming out, she’ll just climb down to a hanging position off the railing and drop the last few inches to the ground. There’re the ladders on the playground equipment, which she traverses up and down just fine, though she does insist on climbing down with her back to the ladder in a position that freaks out every nearby adult the first time they see her do it. There’re the stairs leading up to everyone’s backdoor that she uses to frighten the inhabitants when they look out their window and find a seemingly unsupervised toddler bounding up and down unannounced.

When she comes inside, the climbing continues. All furniture is fair game for her scaling adventures, as is any toy that’s large, flat, and sturdy enough to support her. When she figures out how to stand on those giant rubber balls she loves playing with, I’m not going to have a lot of fun. Unless she can parlay that skill into a job with the circus; that would be fun.

I wish I could stop her from at least climbing indoors because eventually she’s going to hurt herself on one of our rickety pieces of furniture. I pull her off when I catch her doing something dangerous, but when I have a baby on each knee all I can do is command that she get down right now and hope she listens for a change.

Yesterday morning I had one of the boys** sprawled out on the changing table with a radioactive diaper at his feet. I heard Abbie climbing into her booster seat, which is attached to one of our kitchen chairs. Our chairs are old enough to have been used by the pioneers, or at least dumped by the pioneers before they set out west because I’m sure they would have jumped at the first chance to abandon them too. They’re falling apart, and we have to pop joints back into place more often than a Packers trainer.

Abbie can climb in and out of her booster seat with no problem. One day the chair underneath will disintegrate sending her tumbling to the floor, but for now it seems sit-worthy. Unfortunately, Abbie doesn’t just sit in her booster seat; she bounces in it. She loves buckling herself in, possibly because it’s her way of communicating that I need to feed her. When I don’t immediately respond with chicken nuggets or at least Goldfish, she starts screaming and hopping, putting more stress on the chair than your average Cub fan feels while sober.

When I heard her climbing in the chair, I told her to get down and continued wiping. When I heard her bouncing in the chair, I wiped to a stopping point, and rushed out to remove her. The chair maintained its integrity, but she may have been better off if it didn’t. I walked into the kitchen just in time to see it tipping forward.

Abbie hit the ground flat on her face, and boy was she mad. After rescuing and examining her, I found a bit of a nosebleed and a small cut on her lip, but she was otherwise fine not counting psychological damage. She stopped bleeding fairly quickly, but the nosebleed was problematic since she’s still in the habit of banging her head on the floor when she’s frustrated. Whenever I denied her Goldfish throughout the rest of the day, I wound up having to dab up some blood and comfort a child who hurt herself a bit more than anticipated.

Now I’m responding quicker when I notice Abbie climbing on furniture. Hopefully I can stop her before she breaks something, whether it be a chair or a nose.

* …and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out…
** I forget which one, but it was probably Tory, that super-pooper.