Of Bumps, Bruises and Bathroom Doors

So when I say Elizabeth is Karma's gift to my mother, I mean SHE IS KARMA'S GIFT to my mother. She is every kind of adventure, complication, frustration I have visted upon my mother in my lifetime wrapped in an adorable package of chubby cheeks and blonde pigtails. I mistakenly thought the second child might be the child who makes me feel validated, experienced, confident, like a good mother, etc.

No, no kids. God, Fate, the Universe... what have you has instead decided that this child is the answer to "so you THINK you REALLY know how to parent, do you?.... ha, ha HA!" To date here are some of the exploits in the past few months that have made me doubt I have ANY talent at parenting.

The Bathroom Door - I'm having one of those nights where I'm THIS close to a breakdown, so Mike decides to do bath and bedtime for the kids so I can just sit downstairs. Not long after they've all retreated upstairs I hear this - (William) "uh... mom! we need some help up here!" Now keep in mind my son is just a tad (sarcasm) melodramatic. So I barely move and ask "what is it?!" Then I hear, "uh... she's stuck." "Who's stuck?!" (now I'm moving toward the stairs a little quicker). (Mike's voice) "Elizabeth closed the bathroom door and then opened the drawer that blocks the door and now we can't get her out!" Oh boy. I dash up the stairs and sure enough, thanks to some poor planning from an obviously childless contractor, the drawer to the bathroom cabinetry is opened and therefor the bathroom door opens maybe only an inch. All I can see are little baby fingers curled around the door and Elizabeth is screaming frantically because she cannot get out. If this were an older child we could merely say, "shut the drawer and the door will open"... but she is a baby, it won't work. That isn't to say that the whole time we tried squeezing in our fingers, bending hangers around and under the door, slipping other toys through attempting to help her close the drawer (the weight of the door against it since she was pulling so hard did not help) we weren't yelling, "Elizabeth, close the drawer honey! Watch your fingers, close the drawer!" Finally, after what seemed like forever, but was only 12 minutes (and after a lengthy discussion about breaking down/sawing through the door but not being able to because she was right on the other side), we got the right combination of her leaning on the drawer, my cramming my now bruised fingers as far as they could go and pulling on the door and the drawer closed, the door opened and a red-faced, tear-streaked, HYSTERICAL toddler dashed into my arms and would NOT let go. And there ended my "few moments to myself". Ahhhh... the peaceful life of a mother of two. What on earth do people with more children do?!

The Swan Dive
Unlike the story above, this happens on a morning when I have passed the "I'm THIIIIIS close to a breakdown" and actually have one. I'm talking a screaming, crying, shaking, totally taking out my exhaustion on everyone around me BREAKDOWN. I took on way too much with the kids that week and we were all starting to run late on a day where we had to get William to baseball class, then come home, eat, pack and drive 2 hours to Portland to see my in-laws for the weekend. Mike and I begin to fight and I put Elizabeth in her booster seat to do her hair (because if I don't pin this girl down, doing her hair is an impossibility) and I don't realize that I haven't strapped down the seat to the chair it's sitting on. I turn away to grab the comb and rubber bands when I hear, "Oh my GOD, NO!" followed by a huge crash and wailing. Elizabeth loves to kick frantically when in her booster and has thus kicked herself and her booster off the chair and she has landed, head-first onto our hard wood floor. This stops the fight IMMEDIATELY, we get her out of her chair and see that a large bump and bruise are immediately forming on her forhead. She calms down rather quickly, though and her behavior isn't changed, so I'm thinking chances of a concussion or anything serious are slim. We head to baseball class, but I feel like a world-class loser of a parent, so when we return from class we call my in-laws and tell them we'll drive up the next day and we take Elizabeth to the after-hours pediatrician to make sure. The doctor says he's so happy FOR MY SANITY that I brought her in, but as far as her safetly, believe it or not, it's a rather minor injury. Turns out there have been some pretty macabre (as he put it) studies on just how much force it takes to actually usually injure small children enough to damage the brain and it comes out to something like the equivalent of falling directly on their head from about 3 stories up. So she's good. And he gave her points for perfect symmetry on the swan dive. So she walked around looking like she got the worse end of a fight for a few days (and of course the looks we got from others when we had to take her out in public were PRICELESS), but she was fine. I now DOUBLE AND TRIPLE check that booster. Little miss Kickety (as I like to call her) can now kick to her heart's content only when I know she's FULLY STRAPPED DOWN.

Insult to Injury
So if the above head injury were not enough, I must tell you about the few days preceding it and that same day. Previous to Elizabeth's Swan Dive and actually on the same day as, we had a miraculous and unfortunate string of Elizabeth related injuries. The kind of string that makes you want to start hiding out in your own house lest the authorities decide your child is perhaps not safest in your hands or that makes you want to buy a T-shirt for her that says "Danger: Toddler in Motion, I swear my parents don't beat me." For prior to her fall Elizabeth (who has been walking since about 11 months and thus now RUNS everywhere) fell while running on the driveway and scraped up her knee, climbed on a chair and then fell and bit her lip causing her mouth to bleed and then was clobbered by the door leading from the garage to the house because Mike didn't know she was standing RIGHT in front of it when he entered the house. Finally, later in the day after her swan dive, I'm cutting up some food for her and I do it - I cut my daughter. Now, you're saying to yourself, why were you cutting her food so close to her? I WASN'T. Here's what no one tells you folks. Toddlers apparently become like Elastic Man when they want to. You see Elizabeth sits in a booster with a tray on it and I always cut her food on the table first and then place the food on her tray... thus leaving knives out of reach, or so I thought. This day, for the first time ever, JUUUUUUUST as I was bringing the knife down, she managed to reach PAST her tray, past the edge of the table and onto the plate RIGHT where the knife was and viola! I cut her. Now, I saw it happening and managed to stop the knife before it went too far, but it was still enough of a nick to draw the tiniest amount of blood. She barely made a peep, but of course, after all the other bumps and bruises I just thought, "of course! of course I cut her! That's it, I give up. Take my parenting license away." I mean seriously. We're heading up to Portland the next day to celebrate my in-laws 40th anniversary and all the folks there will see a toddler with a bumped/bruised forhead, cut finger, scraped knee and bruised lip. SERIOUSLY?! What kind of mother am I?

Of course with each of these incidents and with all my other complaints about how much she runs, climbs, touches EVERYTHING and basically tortures the rest of us I call my mother for consolation. Am I mentally ill? Mom laughs. Not because she's cruel, kids, but because she has at last received karmic justice for all that I have brought upon her. And she LOVES it.