Elise and "Aunt" Audra
At first, protecting your child from pain is relatively easy. You feed her when she’s hungry, steer clear of gassy foods to keep her belly happy and try to make sure that your bear mobile or whatever potentially dangerous infant distractions you have do not jump out and strangle her. You put her on her back to sleep to protect her from SIDS, hold her head until she’s steady enough to do it on her own, and try your best not to get shampoo in her eyes when you’re washing her hair. These things are all cut and dry and relatively easy to carry out and they give you a false confidence about how great you are at protecting your baby from harm. The worst you have to deal with is watching your baby get a vaccine shot, because you have to sit there and watch and basically cause the pain she’s going through. And that's not even so bad, because you are ultimately doing a good thing.
But when your child becomes mobile, the task of Protector becomes a little more challenging. When she started crawling, we “baby-proofed” the house by doing the standard baby gates, covering the electrical outlets and hiding the breakables. For the most part, those things worked and Ellie remained relatively pain-free. But now that she is walking, it appears as though we have started a whole new ball game. I have come to the realization that there is nothing that you can actually do to protect your child from harm. You can take all the precautionary measures you can possibly think of, but short of confining them to a playpen or putting them in an empty padded room, your child is going to experience pain. And lots of it.
Elise’s life has become a comedy of errors; a slapstick comedy; a DVD extra gag reel; a Three Stooges Skit – only with less laughter and more hysterical crying. Even with all of our baby-proofing efforts, Ellie finds some way to hurt herself at least ten times a day. She trips and falls from an uneven surface. She bangs her head on the coffee table/chair/slide/swing when she tries to stand while her head is under it. She stands with bare feet on the toy she just threw on the floor. The rams her head into the edge of the dining room table. She shuts her fingers in the drawer/door/toy lid. She tries to stand on a ball…and takes a faceplant. In fact, the latest word that Ellie has picked up saying is “Whoa” because every time she falls, slips, bonks her head or otherwise hurts herself I say “Whoa”. I say it a lot. It’s gotten to the point now that she purposely falls to the ground and says “Whoa” like it’s a game.
Speaking of pain, Wednesday, Elise went in for her 9 month check up (we’re still two months behind). She now weighs 18 lbs 6oz (18th percentile) and is 2’5” (73rd percentile) In addition to two vaccine shots, the doctor also wanted her to have blood drawn to check her hemoglobin count. Apparently when they draw blood from a baby, they prick their tiny little finger and then squeeze drops of blood into a vile. This is a very long and seemingly painful process. It was also a messy process, as Ellie is freakishly strong and kept yanking her hand away from the lab tech and getting blood all over herself, the lab tech and me. It looked like a war zone in there. The lab tech said that Elise is a “good bleeder”- in a way that implied that that is a good thing – because she couldn’t get her finger to stop bleeding and had to put together a makeshift bandage with gauze and tape to stop the profuse bleeding. With this new injury trend, I am not sure being a "good bleeder" is a good thing. In fact, we should probably go buy some band aids.
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