Episode 26: I hope DSS isn't reading this

When I was growing up my parents used to like to reminisce about all of the times that something terrible happened or almost happened to me as a baby. There was the time I got the pea suck up my nose and had to go to the hospital, or the time that I fell down a flight of stairs, bounced off of my head and was caught inches away from slamming in to the front door. This was funny to them, as I was admittedly the 'experimental child.'

Aside from a general lack of motivation, inability to do simple math and occasionally crippling anxiety (none of which can be directly blamed on the incidents listed above) I feel like I grew up to be a fairly well-adjusted, intelligent adult. Sure, some of the effects of being the experimental child still linger. I have terrible handwriting and some pretty severe cognitive confusion thanks to a decision to force me in to being right-handed, despite the fact that originally I was clearly a lefty, but for the most part I have learned to live my life as a normal, functioning human.

With this experience under my belt, I have taken a similar experimental approach to raising Av, which has resulted in my fair share of 'oh shit' moments throughout the day. The number one most frequent incident that I come across is the bumping of the head. This is something that used to freak m out a lot at first, but now after a few months has become less of a concern for me.

As she approaches 9-months, the baby is getting to the point where she can just about stand up on her own, and is not too far from being able to walk. This creates a lot of humorous 'milestone' moments, but at the same time, her lack of balance creates a lot of near-miss injuries, too.

Much of our time at home is spent playing on the floor, where I like to strategically set up some of the 257,000 pillows we have in our house to create soft landings for her. I cover up the corners of the walls, places where she could fall backwards and the area around the coffee table. Somehow, she always finds a way to fall in between the pillows and bounce her head off of the hard wood floors.

Most of the bumps are pretty mild, actually, I am never too far away, so I always have a hand on her to break the fall, but babies heads are huge, I think it is something like 98 percent of their total body weight (this number has not been researched), so much of the time she just tips over head first and takes a little bump.

Due to the pageantry of the crying that takes place after the fall, I used to take this pretty seriously, until I realized that it is just the stigma of bumping her head that makes her cry, not the actual pain. Sure, once in a while she might whack it pretty good, but mostly it is just a little bump.

The real pain comes from injuries she brings upon herself, like when she is playing with something hard and plastic, like one of those pointless baby toys that just has three spinning ducks on it, and she slams it off of her nose because she has no motor skills. Or when she uses her ridiculously sharp teeth to bite her own lip.

Th other day she was sitting in the high chair eating a cookie when she broke out in a panicked cry, you know, one of those delayed ones where she is so upset there is no noise coming out, just a purple face, squinted eyes and some tears. Turns out, she got a little too excited with the cookie and ate her own finger. She has bitten me before, trust me, those bastards are sharp.

So the lesson I have learned here is that taking care of children is less about feeding them and keeping them entertained as it is about preventing catastrophic injury at every turn, and then attempting to explain to someone who can't speak and who probably isn't sure what your saying, that trying to climb the bookshelf to grab and eat a three hole punch is not safe.

Thus, the experiment continues on a daily basis. Hopefully, her experiences will shape her in to an upstanding, successful, well adjusted adult like her father. If not, it will probably be my fault. Which I am sure will be mentioned in therapy around age 16.