When I worked in 105 I met many a paranoid parent. They were always so worried their child would trip (gasp!) and fall (no!) and all would be lost; their precious little tot would shatter like Swarovski meeting a sledge hammer. I used to chuckle to myself when parents would watch a child tumble off a climber and cringe as though he/she was watching the 1988 Summer Olympic Springboard event all over again.
“Don’t worry,” I’d quip, “toddlers bounce.”
And, in case you’re unaware, that is true to some degree. Granted, they aren’t like superballs or anything, but they are built to accommodate the lack of coordination and balance that is typical for infants and toddler. All that cute squishy baby fat? Extra padding. They barely feel the bruises that bloom all over their shins, knees and forearms due to all that excess insulation. And their skeletal structure? Well, through infancy and much of toddlerhood, their bones are actually composed mostly of cartilage, with the bones beginning to ossify (harden) at certain ossification points throughout the skeleton. If you doubt me, you can look into it here. Anyway, my point is, I am much more likely to break and arm or leg in a fall down the stairs than the two year old that made me trip (and no, that’s never really happened, or I’d be living off the man in my Hawaiian beach house sipping rum runners with CB at this very moment). When it boils down to it, toddlers are biologically engineered to be more springy and bouncy than older children.

And let me tell you, it’s a damn good thing cause child mortality rate would sky rocket if they weren’t. The three year olds are (often by the grace of the kiddie gods) living proof of this. Over the past 6 months all of the kids have shot up, slimmed down, and become suicidally reckless with the development of gross motor skills. In October Sit Here was sprinting down the ramp to the playground (followed by my ineffectual plea to “stop your feet!”) when he wiped out and lost all the skin on both knees. He got up, looked at me, and kept walking, but when I checked on him a few minutes later I almost cried. My knees tingle still thinking about how painful it looked, the huge scarlet splotches that should have been the kid’s knees. For a week after that he walked without bending his knees. It was sort of funny, if you hadn’t seen the initial damage. Yesterday a little girl (hrm…what to dub this one…I think Ariel due to a certain obsession with and memorization of the Little Mermaid Soundtrack….damn spooky mermaid) tripped while running up the climber steps and slammed her face off a step. She got up and started screaming, “I’m bleeding!” and then she just lost it. That scared me cause this is a fairly mature girl who rarely cries or whines but she was hysterical. I suppose that much blood would scare a lot of people (not me…remind me to blog about shutting my face in the car door sometime), especially a young kid who knows that bleeding=hurt. So I scooped her up (really, my back is due to go out any day now) and ran inside with her. Because it was her lip the blood was everywhere; all over her coat, her white shirt, her hair (blonde so it was kind of Carrie-esque), my coat, my gloves - just everywhere. Needless to say I calmed her down, cleaned her up, and her lip was already closed up by today.

Which was just in time for Dresden to get her feet tangled in the back of her chair (we keep telling her to sit on her bottom but she always gets up on her knees and sticks her feet out though the back), attempt to get up from lunch, and fall forward face first, whacking her chin off the edge of the table on her way down to the floor. Then we had to dig her out from under the upended chair, which had landed on top of her.

Now I know why they stuff our classroom so full of kids….at this rate the population will decrease exponentially until we’re all out of a job by the end of the year (heh, or maybe that explains why there is still no replacement slated to fill my shoes when I move in 47 DAYS).