accident prone

i've been accident prone all my life. falling up stairs, running into poles while bike riding, tripping over nothing walking down the street. i've got all kinds of fun scars and dents to show for it. but now i'm feeling guilty for roping my daughter into my mess.

since she's been born i've not protected her from an incoming projectile, clipped her skin to draw blood while clipping her nails, gotten her lip caught in her carseat buckle, bitten her finger (she put it in there, after all, and i didn't bite her hard), bumped her head countless times and now, given her a paper cut with the window shade. the last one and the lip one have a common theme- nissa putting her mouth on everything. i mean everything. but still, as the parent, i'm supposed to protect my child, not make it worse :(. last night she was playing with the window shade by her changing table. we try to leave it up high enough so she can't reach it, but recently i could see our neighbor at his kitchen sink, so i decided to give nissa a little privacy (and spare him the view of the dirty diaper). this time it was so low she could get the corner of it into her mouth. well, i let her go at it for a while, then when i extracted it from her tight little grip (i thought carefully), she starts bawling and i see a little paper-cut-type cut from the corner of her mouth across her cheek. oh, the horror of being a terrible mother. i put some lanolin on it to help it heal (and protect it from the inevitable moisture from thumb sucking). nissa woke up a couple of times in the night crying; i can only imagine it was because she was having nightmares about the shade cut.

the third time she woke up at 4:30 am, she did something too adorable for words. i picked her up to comfort her and she laid her head on my chest. after a few minutes when she calmed down, she pushed back, pulled the collar of my v-neck tee and opened her mouth! i can take a hint. so after a quick diaper change (that was filled with crying) i nursed nissa. adam came in just as i was starting to feed her and asked why i was feeding her then (since i was due to get up and feed her at 6am). i told him she was hungry and explained what she did and he shrugged and agreed. i didn't realize nissa had put that much together already. she finds new ways to amaze me every day.