First blood

It was bound to happen and I'm surprised it took this long. Small Boy has shed his first blood. We were playing with a ball last night, rolling it back and forth between us, and sometimes it got away from him and he would go crawling after it the way he does almost all things, which is at full tilt. I don't even know what happened but one of his hands slipped out from under him and bam! face first on the hardwood floor. I scooped him up even before he started to scream, while he was still making that red-faced chin quivering I'm working myself up into a good wail face that he makes; when he opened his mouth to let loose I saw that he was bleeding.

Mouth blood makes me nervous. Very very nervous. Both R and I had horrific accidents as young children. As a three year old I tripped while running up the walk to meet my grandfather and bit clean though my tongue. Clean through as in a loose piece of tongue dangling off the side. My mother took me to the emergency room and the doctor said it would heal up and close itself; I was just learning how to talk and my mother said no way am I risking that she develop a speech impediment because of a flapping tongue and made them stitch it up. (My mother, for all the faults I found with her along the way, was often an amazing advocate for her children. A true mother bear.) I have a little scar on my tongue to this day. I remember getting a lollipop. R knocked both his front teeth out as a four year old on the very table that we, out of some perverse attraction to danger, have in our apartment. He didn't just knock them out as in they fell on the floor. He knocked them out as in he smashed them backwards up into his gums so hard they damaged the permanent teeth waiting in the wings. So yeah, mouth blood makes me very. Very. Nervous.

We got Small Boy cleaned up and tried to check out his mouth, which you can imagine went down very well with him and took a long time and was accompanied by renewed wailing and much mama-clasping. He's got a fat lip on the top, a little cut on the bottom lip, and a strange bruising appearance on the bottom gum under his two middle teeth that we're checking out with the doctor. That makes me nervous. He's got such lovely teeth. He is eating and drinking well, though, so he must not be in too much pain, though he is on the cranky side. Which is fair.

Last night after he fell I was holding him and comforting him; he bled on my shirt. After we got him settled down I went to change and to soak my tee-shirt so the blood didn't set. In one of my more perverse Angelina Jolie-Billy Bob Thorton sentimental moments I almost didn't wash it out. Small Boy's first blood, you know. Then I got a hold of myself and ran cold water over my shirt and scrubbed some soap over the stains and watched the water swirl down the drain.

Being a parent may mean wearing my heart on my sleeve, but it doesn't have to mean wearing my Heart's blood.