Nightmare

This is what Nate looked like after finding the bucket of blackberries we salvaged from our yard. He likes berries a LOT.

The rue helplessness of being a parent is watching your child make mistakes. I'm not talking about small errors, like using improper grammar or placing the nice wooden cutting board in the dishwasher when everyone knows wood needs to be washed by hand. I'm talking about those moments when you are watching your child run towards a busy street, and you can see a car coming, and no matter how fast you run you will never get there in time.

Nathan does not sit still at the table. It's a well known fact. We tried using a booster seat for him and strapping him in, but the squealing it caused was so unpleasant that I decided having him run around was the lesser of two evils. Now what he likes to do is switch chairs.

Last night he decided to stand on one of these chairs, and lean backwards against the chair's back, flinging his arms over the edge. Across the table, I looked up and I knew instantly what was going to happen. I saw the chair rock backward. I reached out and yelled, but I was too late. The chair toppled over, Nate's head falling right toward the glass windows to the deck. His arms were around the chair back, and the chair fell right on top of them.

It took me forever to get around the table because in nightmares you just can't run fast enough. Also, Steve jumped up so quickly that his seat fell back and I had to step around it. By the time I got there, Nate was standing, but more unhappy than I have ever seen him.

The thing about such small children is that they can't tell you anything. Were his arms OK? Did he hit his head? I once worked at a daycare where a child fell off a climbing structure and I didn't know until the head of the center called me at home the next morning that he had hit his head, and apparently the child's mother was wondering why I hadn't told her about the goose-egg. Answer: nobody told ME. So here was Nathan, crying until he threw up, and I couldn't help but compulsively feel his arms for breaks and his head for bumps.

It turns out he was OK, just hot and tired and really, really frightened. Which is good, simply because we are hoping this event will keep him from standing on chairs in the future. Or at least standing on chairs and attempting to climb over them backwards. But I know kids, and I know he won't learn. Kids do such strange things, most of them dangerous, and as parents all we get to do is yell and scream and remind them again and again about how DANGEROUS it all is. And then we get to scrape what's left of them off the floor when things go wrong, and somehow make it right again.