After the Fall

The other day Jett fell down the stairs. We live on the third floor of a condo building, and he fell down one flight of carpeted stairs just outside our front door. It's amazing that this hasn't happened before, since he's been up and down our three flights of stairs nearly every day of his life. 

It's terrifying to watch your child fall down the stairs. Jett went flying face first, flipped head over heals, and landed on his back. It was the flip that was the scariest, watching his little head bounce sideways on the stairs like a rag doll. I was standing closest to Jett so I made it down to the bottom just a second after he did, with Charlie right behind me. Honestly, I don't even remember where Kai was, in his highchair, I think. Jett started sitting up and I picked him up and pulled him to me. 

By the sound of his cry, I could tell he wasn't terribly hurt, but we were all scared, and the tears were leaking out of his eyes. I sat and held him on the stairs and kept looking at his eyes, which were closed. His eyelashes looked like copper, so long and shiny with his tears. I think if I could have run my finger across them, they would have chimed like little copper bells.

I just sat there, holding him and smoothing down his hair, trying to help him stop crying. Then I had to ask him to stop crying, because his cries were sounding a little manufactured, and we were in the stairwell where our neighbors could hear us (although I suspect they can always hear us). Then I tried to shift his weight from one of my legs to the other, which irritated him. Then I suggested that we go upstairs and sit on the couch, and that really made him angry. He tried to lay back in my arms by repeatedly cranking my neck back, which irritated me. Finally I walked upstairs and went inside without him, which made both of us angry. Some comfort that was.

Charlie got to be the hero then, and coax him inside. Eventually he came and sat next to me on the couch, after I agreed to get him a sippy cup of milk and turn on Curious George (on the TV). There we sat. Me, frustrated on the couch, and the little Angry Uninjured One, now happy, with his long copper eyelashes and his sippy cup of milk.