Ouch
We are in the middle of winter in Wisconsin. Among other things, this means that the ground is covered in snow, ice and salt, a lot of which gets tracked into the floor in the new minivan. To better preserve the fabric we ordered rubber floor mats which arrived a week ago. After unpacking them, Chris and Everett started playing around with the boxes and in the process Everett got hurt. Without going into too much detail, he hit his head on the floor pretty hard while Chris was trying to hold him upright. He cried, which almost never happens from physical injuries, and this added to our sense of alarm. We laid him on the couch, put ice on his head, put Phineas and Ferb on Netflix and kept a close eye on him. For the next hour Everett seemed to start feeling better while Chris started feeling worse. By bedtime Everett seemed back to his normal self and was pouncing on Chris while getting “settled down” to go to sleep, but it took a few days before Chris could start to get the event off his mind. Afterward Everett agreed with Chris it was a bad idea to be playing with the boxes the way we were. However, using Dad logic it might be more accurate to say that this was a questionable idea, and that the reason it made the transition to “bad” was because Everett got hurt. It’s worth noting that Dads come up with a lot of questionable ideas that seem, in retrospect, benign. Some even get spun as fun afterward. But the most memorable (and gut wrenching) ones seem to be those when your child got hurt and you could have prevented it.
On a related subject Chris has noticed that he and Everett are roughhousing less often than we used to, and the most likely explanation is that when we do someone often gets hurt. This is probably due to the simple facts that Everett now weighs close to 50 pounds and he is getting stronger everyday. Continued roughhousing will likely require a safer play area than we have in this house.
Oh Chris, there are so many scary things that happen to parents with their children. You and Everett have come through this incident. We all know how much love there is in this family.