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.

Oh, when I was about six and my sister about three, I was pushing her on our swing set, which hadn't been anchored down. It tipped over and a piece of relatively sharp metal cut my sister in the head.

Nice, light but engaging book finished (one of the old school Regency romances that appear to be going the way of the dodo). Time to tackle the living room. And we should probably figure out how to better childproof the rest of the house in the next month or so, because eventually she'll get the height and arm strength she needs to clear the gates.

It's just horrible to see her fall so hard, even if she instantly gets up and starts screaming, and climbs back onto the couch the instant she stops crying. And it's stressful to have her climbing all over the place, grabbing all kinds of things that until today were safely out of reach--she mastered the couch, the love seat, and the rocking chair all today, so that's a lot of previously unclaimed territory.