Oliver Simpson

I got a call from daycare yesterday to inform me that Oliver had a little face-plant onto the floor, and his big strong teeth cut into his upper lip. When I saw him after coming home from work, I half-laughed and half-cooed out of pity. His lip, as you can see above, doesn't really look bad from the front. And if you didn't know our kid, you wouldn't notice anything. But he looked...different. The swelling of his upper lip made him look like a Simpson's version of himself.

I surprised myself with how much the incident did not bother me. I was having a very busy afternoon, so part of it was that I didn't have time to be worried. But I'm also prepared for the fact that as Mr. O cruises, climbs, walks, and rolls, he will also be falling, bonking, tripping, and tumbling. And though (as previously discussed) I will not identify myself as a bad mom, I will readily admit to being human, and subsequently catching more near-misses - and misses- than I care to admit. Little fingers between outlets and the prongs inside them. Cedar wood chips, rubber bands, a quarter, a bobby pin, toilet paper, balls of cat hair, a used baby wipe, and a jingle bell inside his mouth. One and a half stories of stairs climbed out of my eyesight. Glass coasters in-hand, arced back-and-forth in the air like a tomahawk.

Maybe I wasn't upset with the news of the lip incident because, well, it was one less thing that happened under my watch, one less thing to add to the list of things I feel bad about. Until the next near-miss, anyway.