Wednesday 11 July 2012

Bump!

It's what makes your heart skip and your blood run cold - when your little one takes a tumble and for a moment you think it might be very serious.
Joseph has had a few bumps recently, he seems to be having something of a clumsy patch. Either that or he's just getting too adventurous for his own good. Perhaps it's both, he's that sort of little boy.
On Tuesday last week he took quite a bad tumble. He's a terror for climbing up on things and we have some faux leather covered storage cubes that I use for keeping stuff he shouldn't have his little mitts in well out of his sight. At nineteen months he likes climbing and will often be seen using a lower object to reach a higher one. Sometimes he will use his push along car to reach up onto our dining table. Other times he will use one of the boxes that contain duplo or brio trains to stand on and reach up. This time he was using a black cube to reach up to my sewing cabinet and have a good look at what might be lurking on the top. There was nothing up there he hadn't seen before, just his nappy bag and a few odd and ends pushed well out of reach.
I should explain at this point that given the size of house we currently live in (teeny tiny) I have got the living room to as safe an arrangement as possible given our current furniture. The only way to make it safer would be to start getting rid of some quite big things, or invading and annexing next doors living room to get some space. Neither is practical at the moment. The result is not perfect, but it's the best I can manage.
On this morning I had popped upstairs to hang up a load of laundry. I'd have hung it up outside in the bright sunshine, but as anyone living in the UK knows, at the moment the sunny patches are transitory, only paying us brief visits between the bouts of rain that well warrant the description "stair rods". Had I merely gone into the back garden I would have shod him and taken him out with me where, as yet, he has managed to do little more to himself than grass stain on the knees.
Instead I had to go upstairs to the bathroom. Now, I've left him on his own in the living room to do this many times before and nothing untoward had happened.
On hanging up the third item I was interrupted by a scream. I'm used to him crying, usually it's because I've left the room and he doesn't like it. This time it was the sudden, sharp scream that sends a jolt down your spine. I dropped the pile of warm damp washing and ran downstairs to find my little boy lying flat on the floor next to the sewing cabinet with lots and lots of blood in his mouth.
I have, till now, been quite cool in a crisis. When someone else is injured I'm usually the calm one who gets the first aid kit. When at college I managed to machine sew my own finger, I was the calm one and everyone else panicked.
This time I was not cool, or even slightly collected. He just lay there and howled like only a scared small child can and I got flustered. What do I do? Do I try and move him? Well, no. Do I dare look in his mouth? With all that blood I didn't want to do any more damage, so no. Should I call 999? Is it that bad? HELP!
I called my Mum and I was feeling quite panicky. I must have scared her from my tone of voice as she decided to come rushing straight over. Perhaps it really was bad!

Would you believe the little scamp? Just as I'm getting to the end of the phone call, now relieved I'm getting some help and wondering what I'll tell the people in A&E (I didn't see it happen, can't give them a full explanation, they'll be suspicious, panic panic panic) he stops crying, looks up at me, smiles and gets up. Within seconds he's running around like his usual self and not a care in the world, save for the blood on his chin. My Mum came over anyway and we realised that all he'd done was damaged the little bit of membrane that joins the top lip to the top gum. He had a little cut on his lip and that was all. He must have caught his mouth on the corner of the sewing table as he slipped, damaging the membrane and getting the cut on his lip.
Crisis over. By the end of the day, you'd not know anything had happened at all.

Over the weekend, he has fallen over a number of times and head butted the edge of a table.
Today, when coming in from the garden he fell up the steps and cried. Later, when the door was open for a little fresh air he tried to climb out with only socks on and slipped on the door sill before I could get to him. He also tried to climb up on one of my black boxes and used and empty really useful box for leverage which pitched him face first down on the floor. This last incident resulted in a small cut on the bottom of his chin. I put a plaster on it and he spent the next few hours patting it and pulling funny faces, clearly puzzled by it's restrictive nature. After a while he got bored of it, pulled it off and gave it back to me. If he keeps this up then I'll just always have a box of plasters and some Calpol ready to hand.

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