Max's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Weekend (for his head)

This past week has been one for the books for Max. As parents, we feel that we've done a pretty good job at keeping Max out of harm's way. Yeah, it seems to be taking up a lot more of our time than normal lately, but that's toddlers, I guess. On the other hand, we don't like to keep him from doing things just because there's a risk of injury. Otherwise, he'd spend his whole day strapped in his high chair. So we let him crawl wherever he wants, we let him climb stairs, we let him hang out on furniture...we're never far away, but we also have a good sense of what Max is and isn't capable of, so there's a certain amount of trust between parties.

Friday morning, Max greeted the day by hurtling off the bed onto his nose. Thankfully, there was no blood (my boy? BLEEDING?!?), but he gave himself a good nasal carpet burn. I didn't even know those were possible! So, strike one.

Later that morning, Max was doing his thousandth loop of the coffee table in our living room and stepped on his own foot. The other 237 times he stepped on his own foot, he crashed to the ground sideways or backward and had a good chuckle about it. This time, he caught either his chin, upper lip or top gums on the corner of the table. There was no laughing; there was crying. Also, as Paul Thomas Anderson had predicted, there was blood. Quite a bit of it. Hm. My baby was bleeding. We got a popsicle into him right quick and that seemed to help both his mood and the wound. From what we could tell, he had ripped his frenum (that thing attaching your lip to your gums - use your tongue outside your top teeth to feel it) and bruised up his top gums. This is a relatively common injury for kids when they have their first good face plant and is also classified as fairly minor (mouth injuries heal quickly and well). Eventually, the bleeding stopped and Max got another popsicle for his troubles. Strike two.

Yesterday morning, while up at the cottage, Max was romping around with us on an air mattress and generally having a good time playing with his parents. Then, without warning, he reared up into a vertical kneel and launched himself head-first into the wood-paneled wall. There's testing one's limits, but this is getting ridiculous. Instant goose-egg. Strike three.

I guess, all this is to say that the degree to which I keep an eye on Max relies heavily on some assumptions of the predictability of his actions, based on his previous actions. It seems like some of these assumptions are starting to break down and that he's starting to try new things without much warning. Looks like we'll have to clamp down a bit more around here. It is interesting that babyproofing gadgets (except for possibly bed rails) wouldn't have done a thing to reduce the impact of any of these injuries.

[Daddy's note, September 2nd: Not to be held back by the mathematics of tired baseball cliches, Max moved from the third strike into the fourth quarter by slamming his fingers in a cabinet door today. I chastised myself for not getting a latch on it in time, but a) I had placed a heavy elastic band on the door, making it a lot harder to open, and b) the latch would still have allowed Max to open the door wide enough to catch his fingers in it, just not wide enough to remove any contents of the cupboard. I guess some things, he'll just have to learn from his mistakes. Can't wait to light up the fireplaces...]