Our son is steadily getting himself into increasingly dangerous situations as time goes on. The strength of his little legs combined with his toned arms is making every area of our little home particularly susceptible to becoming a dangerous, child-crippling jungle gym. This new situation has had my wife and I on edge (particularly when our son situates himself perilously close to a step leading directly to a tile-floored head injury). This is exactly the situation we found ourselves in earlier this week.
You see, our son likes playing with everything except his toys. Yes, I’m sorry to inform all of the uncles, aunts, and grandparents reading this that our son doesn’t play with all of the plastic wonders you kindly bought for him, but it’s true. Despite our attempts to define a little world for him with blue-foam squares, a mirror, and a lovely assortment of toys, books, and other fun things for children he still travels elsewhere. He happily attempts to poke holes in Mommy’s paper lamps. He tries to get his hands on a couple of glasses and a bottle of wine. He seeks out anything he can find on the floor and immediately puts it into his mouth. He’ll pull down books full of words he can’t yet read, pronounce, or understand. And sometimes he perches himself on the “step to head trauma” and begins to lean…
Now I’m pretty out of shape. I’ve been living on a diet of reading, typing, sitting and thinking. This makes my ability to move quickly hampered by time and formed by graduate student temperament. In other words: I don’t move quickly often. Well, as our son was “heading” for disaster I slid across the tile (yes, like a baseball player going for home) over the step and down it, curled my arm under his little head (and beautifully scraping it on the tile’s grout), and landed quite softly. I don’t think our son really knew what happened. He wasn’t crying or hurt… but he was silent. He was processing. He didn’t know that Dad just saved him. He’ll learn in good time.