To this point, it has mostly been the occasional bruise from a face plant here and there. But somehow, in the last week or two the injuries have begun to escalate. I’m hoping we will level off at some point because even though he makes quick recoveries, it is oh-so-hard to watch him deal with the consequences of not quite being able to control his body.. but really thinking he can. Practice makes perfect, I suppose.
Aed has many characteristics that also belong to his father. One of these is what Ian calls Gorilla Logic. Let’s say there is a bottle (chasing bottles awaiting recycling around the kitchen is one of his favorite past times) that he has managed to knock under the table. Let’s say there is also a chair blocking his way under the table. If he attempts to climb over the under-structure of that chair, but gets himself stuck, BUT can still see the bottle he wants, he will just keep squirming and pushing and wriggling until we either rescue him, or he gets where he wants to be. Basically Gorilla Logic entails that if pushing isn’t working, you push harder. If there’s stuff in your way, you plow through it to get it out of the way, etc.
Turns out my baby’s brain didn’t come with an abort mechanism.
This has lead to all kinds of precarious situations, and he is learning gradually that he can actually back up, or reconsider and try something from a different direction. Needless to say, this has lead to many injuries (though I have to say, the injuries obtained from these situations often go unacknowledged by the child who has triumphed).
Last week, Aed sustained an injury of epic proportions (are you guys familiar with hyperbole?). We were hanging out in the bedroom upstairs and he lost his balance and fell, hitting his face on the edge of the bed on the way down. He started crying, Ian picked him up, and I went into his room to get a paci as that is the most effective way to calm him down. I gave him the paci and we thought all was well. I took it out to check his mouth and found his face underneath covered with blood.
He had busted his lip.
It swelled up, but didn’t seem to bother him much after the initial damage had been done. It was actually pretty entertaining to watch him suck at it and try to figure out why his lip was a funny shape.
(You can see a bruise by his eye from a run-in with the drying rack a few days prior..)
We moved on with our lives.. until yesterday.
Aed has a new love for carrying things around while he walks back and forth between the living room and the kitchen. Any old paper or toy will work.
He was doing just this and was making a stop at the coffee table to get into some mischief there, but misjudged how far it still was from him. He reached out to lean on it, but instead fell and hit his face right on the edge.
He bled a lot. I worried that he had knocked his teeth, but it turns out he just tore his frenulum on his upper lip (perhaps all these injuries will just open the door for me to become very educated about obscure body parts!). Sadly, his little lip still swelled, and it broke my heart just a little bit when I was cleaning him up and saw that his previous mouth injury was still not even entirely healed.
We teased him about his collagen lips and he took it like a champ :)
I suppose this is the life of one who is parent to an adventurous, gung-ho child..
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