Toddler Down

Abbie is heavily scarred right now. I don’t mean she’s feeling deep emotional pain from the trauma of losing her place as the family’s only child and center of attention, though that may be true as well. I mean she’s taken multiple tumbles recently. It’s nothing serious, just the standard toddler trip ups. Still, I feel compelled to document her wounds just in case I need practice should protective services come calling.

First there’s the gash across her thigh. She picked up that one falling off of her changing table when she was supposed to be napping. You can scroll back a couple days to discover why she was on the changing table, or you can stay with this post, avoid being grossed out, and just assume she was up there to pull forbidden objects off her highest shelf like usual. She fell off the table while reaching for something a little too far over the edge, and scraped her thigh on the corner on her way down, resulting in a cut several inches long. When I entered her room to determine exactly why she was upset, I assumed she was sore from falling off the furniture, or maybe just saddened that she disappointed us by failing to meet our expectations that she take a nap. Turns out it was the thigh abrasion that made her unhappy.

Then there’s the cut across her neck, again several inches long. That one looks really bad, but when I explain that she got it falling off of a toy while trying to climb on the entertainment center when we weren’t paying attention … well, I guess that still sounds bad, but hear me out. The top of the entertainment center is one of the few horizontal surfaces in our home high enough to keep forbidden objects out of her hands, so it tends to accumulate Abbie magnets. If she wants candy, or crayons, or a fascinating toy that she’s broken into several pieces that are about the size of a toddler’s airway, she knows where to get it. We kept her play kitchen next to the entertainment center for months before either of us realized that she could climb on it. Suddenly Abbie discovered that it’s scalable, and next thing we know she’s crashing it to the ground. Somehow she scraped her neck on the entertainment center’s corner on the way down. I suppose any child smart enough to figure out how to climb on a narrow piece of flimsy plastic is smart enough to put an inches long wound on her neck without suffering further damage.

Finally there are the skinned knees. Both of them. She did that running down a very steep driveway. We were visiting a house on a hill steep enough to make Sisyphus cringe. I pulled Abbie out of the car first, stood her by my side, and reached in to pull out one of the boys. While I had my back turned, she took off down the driveway. Normally she’s pretty good about staying near me when I let her out of the car, or at least not running away at full speed, but this time she saw a local walking a dog. She ran to the street to pet the puppy, and all I could do with a baby carrier in my hands was yell at her to stop. Suddenly she lost her balance, possibly because she was trying to comply with my command, and flopped forward onto the concrete. I scrambled to find a location flat enough to set down the carrier without having it go flopping down the driveway too, and ran after her. I found her with skinned knees and probably sore palms, but otherwise in good shape except for the screaming. The man with the dog felt horrible after witnessing a sweet little girl injure herself. Not horrible enough to stop and see if we needed any help or even to say anything, but still pretty bad. I hauled her back up the hill to the house, singing soothing sounds the whole way.

And that’s why Abbie looks like she fell out of a tree, getting hit repeatedly by every branch on the way down. I’m not negligent in a criminal way, just in a “parent of three children ages 2 and under” way.