When my brother was three (I think) he cut his head on the corner of an entertainment center. It was after a neighbor daughter’s evening birthday party. He was hyper and running around, there was a balloon on the floor. It was inevitable. He went to the ER with my parents to get three stitches on his forehead, I went to our neighbors house to have private hysterics. He still has the scar. He’s still the only kid I know of who cut himself on a balloon.
Two little tales, both about me. I am a clumsy adult… I was a clumsy child.
First one was baby-carrier related. I’m not sure how this happened, but Mom tells me I flipped it off the couch (while I was in it) and landed face-down on the floor. I wasn’t hurt, but she remembers thinking that I looked “like a turtle,” with a big plastic shell.
Second one: at a park in Hastings, NY with my family. We were visiting my Grandma, Dad’s side (she lived up the street from the park). Ever-Observant Rosebud, approximately age four, walks past a swingset, failing to note the trajectory of the kids on the swings, and learns that human flight is possible when she briefly becomes airborne as one of the swings, carrying a kid, crashes into her. It probably sounds exaggerated but I swear I remember being in the air for a split second. I’m fuzzy on the landing part. Probably with good reason! Somehow I wasn’t injured. Kids must have some layer of kevlar (sp?) or something under their skin…
My nickname ,“Wump”, comes from when i was smaller and always fell out of bed, making the sound “whump”. Misspell it and you get Wump.
gotta love that gravity…
I was the child most parents dread having. While my other siblings never seemed to get into many mishaps, I made up for them all, perhaps being of the opinion that since they didn’t do anything interesting, I would.
Fell face first out of bed and chipped a tooth and found out that the floor really is hard.
Rode my bike down a great washout into the big ditch across the street (the batcave - my other brother and I were playing Batman and Robin) and discovered that the old bike brakes don’t work in soft sand and when descending at great speed at a 45 degree angle. Hit the ditch bottom rather hard and laid the bike down to skin bare legs.
Ran with a twig in my mouth and tripped and discovered why Mom said never to run with things in your mouth. Scraped the back of my throat slightly.
Walking along a sea wall, balancing, when told not to, but did so anyhow because the 8 inch wide top seemed as big as a highway and fell into the water. Discovered my Dad could move faster than the speed of light when he dove in to fish me out.
Was wearing those damn flip-flops and following my Dad and older brother, who were wearing better shoes, into shallows to gather oysters and discovered that flip flops get slippery when wet. Foot slid sideways on one and instantly discovered that oyster shells are razor sharp. Dad carried me out of the shallows in haste with me observing with interest the 3 inch cut on the ball of my foot and the meat within. (Didn’t need stitches.)
Hit myself in the head with the prongs on a hammer while driving nails. (The bump is still there after all these years.)
Climbed a pine tree in shorts and lost my grip and slid down trunk. Walked bowlegged for a time afterwards and did not wear shorts again to climb trees.
Wanged my head on almost everything with a corner.
For a time I figure my folkss were going to have to put flashing warning lights on doors because I kept smacking into the edges of them.
Jumping off of the top of the slide on the swing set with a bath towel cape would not, I discovered, enable me to fly like Superman. (No doctor that time.)
While wearing shorts, I passed too close to the tailpipe of the just used car and found out that it really is real hot.
The best is yet to come. No one in my family has ever forgotten this. Having watched many a cartoon where the characters use scissors to cut a stream of water, I waited until one day when my Mom had a neighbor over to visit and decided to tinkle in the bathroom. A set of scissors was on the toilet. I looked at them. I saw my pee stream. I recalled the cartoon. (Who says TV doesn’t influence people!) I took the scissors. (I can just feel the men wincing here.) I discovered that urine doesn’t cut like in the cartoon, but slip with the aim and the penis will.
My mother still remembers me calling her to come into the bathroom and when she arrived, seeing me there with scissors in one hand and a big slice through the side of my ‘dingle.’ The neighbor lady was impressed that Mom did not run screaming through the house but calmly inspected the damage, wrapped ‘it’ in a washcloth and we got to see the doctor again. I think the Doc was amused. (It was interesting that back then, every time my Mom called him for one of my incidents, we got right in.) He decided that I did not need stitches, but taped me up and for several days I got to walk around like I had an erection and pee through a hole in the bandage. No lasting damage was done, but no one left scissors in the bathroom for years after that. (Ya know, when you’re that young, the old meat missile isn’t as sensitive as later on, thank goodness.)
I was such an entertaining child.
My sister and I have matching scars on our foreheads, both incidents occured at age six, and both cause by each other.
ME: I was in the living room and saw my sister (four years younger) was messing around with the clothes that mom had spent all day ironing (and reminded us many times of that fact). I ran to stop her and leaped over the vacuum cleaner hose just as mom was pulling it out of my way so I wouldn’t fall. I did not leap high enough, caught the hose and did a dive into the corner of the console stereo. Mom panicked, grabbed both of us and a wet towel for my head, drove to dad’s work, picked him up (it was on the way to the emergency room), got to the emergency room and got 8 stitches in my head. When the doctor asked me what happened, I told him “My mommy tripped me.”
SISTER: Our old school (designed in 1930, now a local recreation center) had a sunken gymnasium, and the middle part of the very large windows pushed out at sidewalk level for air circulation. I dared her to run under the windows, since she was small enough, and evidently she had grown more that I realized. She hit the fourth window at full speed and knocked herself out. 8 stitches on that one, too.
We’re much better friends now.