Susan, please stop flagellating yourself over this. Annabel is a healthy, happy toddler who will continue to be happy and healthy, no matter what size house you live in. All that's important to her is the fact that her mommy and daddy love and dote on her without reservation. And clean diapers. You'll never be able to completely child-proof a room, let alone a house. She's smart enough to peel the paint off the walls if that's the only thing left in the room.

Annabel is a healthy, happy toddler who will continue to be happy and healthy, no matter what size house you live in.

Barring catastrophic falls because I happen to turn my back for two seconds. Sigh.

I'm about to go read for an hour, now that she's in bed, because I want to actually do some relaxing, just-for-fun reading for a change, dammit. (My books of the week have been fiction research that's interesting but a bit of a slog, plus a memoir I felt like I should read because it's considered Important among the sort of lefty Christians I commune with, only I thought the author was self-indulgent and self-important, and couldn't present an idea in an orderly linear fashion if his life depended upon it, so last night I gave myself permission to put it in the back-to-library pile unfinished.) And then I'm going to take a fresh look at the living room and see if I can reconfigure things a little so that every second of my life won't be a game of keepaway.

Middle class famalies in NYC live in one bedroom apartments for YEARS after a baby is born. And they don't seem to have a rash of developmental delays. (We DO have baby bars on the windows though and those are darn handy)

I grew up in a big house and look how screwed up I am.

Maybe we ought to start giving stuff away at bridal showers. Make it a sort of free-for-all to claim duplicate stuff.

Back in my mid-20s when soooooo many of my college friends were getting married, and I was suffering from a massive, ugly broken heart, I thought it should be acceptible to have a "Well, it looks like I'm gonna be single for a while" shower. It seemed to be more unfair that I was expected to shell out for nice new things for friends that were becoming dual-income families, when I had fished so many of my own belongings out of the trash after end-of-year dorm migrations, than it was that their relationships worked out when mine did not.

I grew up in a big house and look how screwed up I am.

I got dropped on my head as a baby, while living in a medium-sized house, and look how great I turned out!

I think part of how kids learn not to hit there heads on things - is by doing it a few times. Many more than you would think nessacry .

hey Dylan , good to see you around.

Someday I will send some recipes in...

happy anniversary to Jessica and Fonebone.

and there was one more thing , but I forgot.

Barring catastrophic falls because I happen to turn my back for two seconds. Sigh.

My kid, living in a moderately baby-proofed house with her own baby-proofed room, fell and cut her head on the coffee table.

TWICE.

Catastrophic falls happen, and you feel like a rotten parent, but they happen to everybody.

I think I was over my more major ouchies (6 stitches in knee, 2 x 6 in chin) before they took the stitches out. It's the parents for whom it lingers (well, most parents. not mine).

As a child of about 4 or 5 I fell off the top of an upright piano. Also, at preschool age my older brother, my sister and I all wandered out onto the highway in front of our farm. In each case someone stopped and brought us back to our mom.