Cold Spaghetti

The Preface: We have no child safety equipment in our home. None. However, we do not have stairs in our home. My parents have even less safety measures in their home. And they DO have stairs. Big, tall, hardwood ones. With spindles to get caught in, slippery floors to lose traction on, and hard surfaces to pack the punch.

So how do we keep an eye on ever-so-active Kate? And how did we keep an eye on Will before he was old enough to tackle them on his own? This is how: we communicate constantly, keeping tabs on who is watching which child where and providing updates when the situation starts to change. All the time clarifying and updating the who, what, and where.

Somehow, this didn’t happen so well this weekend.

See these stairs? Straight, long, tall, hard, and unyielding?Yup. What you’re now thinking is exactly what happened.

Kate fell down these stairs. From the top, or at least very very very close to it. It is a fall that could have killed her, should have seriously injured her, and in the very least must have decently hurt her. The thudding sound of her body going down these stairs is, without question, the worst sound I have ever heard.
I found her at the bottom, lying on her back, having just hit the bottom floor. Still in her hand were pieces of clothes (freshly washed and folded and placed among our suitcase upstairs) with others lying up and down the stairs around her. It was obvious that she had climbed the stairs alone, rummaged through the clothes, and chosen some to carry back down. Somewhere near the top, it all went very wrong.

I reached her so quickly that she hadn’t yet started to cry. She was in that moment of shock and surprise, the split second before you register pain. She let out the first cry after her eyes met mine. But, surprisingly, her cries did not last long — they were very short-lived, actually. She did have (has) a bruise on her forehead and red marks along the right side of her cheek, but nothing that looked truly serious. No blackout. No vomiting. No strange eye movement. No odd limb positions, pain while moving, or stiffness in walking. Nothing. After a minute of crying, pushing away bags of ice, and fussing over us looking at her head and eyes, she calmed down, pointed outside, and asked for “bubbles.”

It seemed like I was in worse shape… shaking, swallowing back bile, trying not to think about the sounds etched in my head and the pictures they painted. I have never been so afraid.

Some lessons:
— No matter who is watching, supposed to be watching, or assumed to be watching … everything is always on my watch. I am having a much harder time being around while others keep an eye on her and am definitely more nervous over her.
— Kate’s head is a diamond. Nothing is harder.
— Kate will make an excellent addition to the NFL or NHL.
— Kate does not learn well from accidents. The very next day, I stopped packing in a moment of dread and rushed to the stairs on instinct… and found her halfway up the stairs.

To my children: please, let this be the last of your near-death experiences. It’s too much for your poor Mother to bear.