Kids Who Climb
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, May 13, 2010 10:43 PM
When my daughter was a toddler, she hardly ever got hurt.
I’m not bragging here. It wasn’t due to my vigilance as a parent. It was just that Camilla rarely put herself in situations where it was possible for her to get hurt.
For instance, if she was in need of amusement, she’d find some blocks or some books and spend half an hour stacking cubes or turning pages. If she was feeling especially spunky, she might consider throwing a ball down the stairs.
I’ll tell you what she never did: scale an easy chair and straddle the back of it, as if it were a horse she was riding. She certainly wouldn’t have done it practically every time my back was turned, grinning at her own cleverness and oblivious to the danger involved.
But guess who does do things like that?
Of course, yes. My son.
Camilla was safe as a toddler because she was cautious, and because her favorite place to be was on my lap. It’s difficult to get injured when you’re sitting on Mama’s lap.
Blaise thinks lap-sitting is for babies. Even when nursing and listening to books - two activities which you’d imagine would require him to be still - he prefers, at a minimum, to stand on my knees. He thinks it’s even better if I’ll allow him to have his feet on the floor. (I usually won’t, at least with the nursing. Ouch!)
My little guy constantly sports a bump here, a bruise there. Since his favorite hobby is attempting to get as close to the ceiling as possible before his mother notices, it’s bound to happen.
I try to be creative with barricades and to provide deterrents. I work on teaching him to get down safely, since I figure there’s no way I can make him stop climbing completely. And I’m always ready with kisses and sympathy when he inevitably tumbles. Boys will be boys, right? Bumps happen.
But I’ll be honest: there’s a part of me that shivers when I think of what might be in our future. My grandmother says that when my father was a boy, the nurses at the emergency room knew her name because she brought him in so often for stitches and casts. Blaise looks exactly like the baby pictures of my dad; maybe he inherited other traits from him too.
Yikes.
Who’s the patron saint of the accident prone? Or better yet, who’s the patron saint of their mothers?
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