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.

I tried to amputate my own fingers with a blender when I was 6.

When I was a child, I used to sleepwalk. My mother put a gate at the top of the steps in hopes of preventing me from falling down them. It didn't work. Evidently I removed the gate, placed it against the wall, and headed downstairs--literally. I must have slipped, and went tumbling down, right into an octagon-shaped end-table at the base of the steps. The sharp point met my head, and I bled like a stuck pig.

We all fall, no matter what precautions have been taken.