why is it always the face?

we went to indiana for the long holiday weekend (more on that later). in order to give us a proper send off, madelyn decided to bust her nose and bleed profusely late friday afternoon. wasn't that thoughtful?

she was getting into things on the dining room table - that she wasn't supposed to be touching - and i had asked her to please stop playing in there. i was working on getting everything packed and cleaned for our trip. and then i heard a thump followed by screaming. at first it was a normal bumped-my-body cry but then it got into serious injury mode in about 10 seconds. by the time i dropped what i was doing and raced over she was sort of next to and under on of the dining room chairs that she had tipped over. it was the chair that a bunch of birthday balloons were tied to so i couldn't really see where she was climbing out from. what i could see was blood on the wall, blood on the carpet, blood on her shirt, and blood on her face, hands, legs, and feet. and it took me a few seconds to figure out where the source might be.

but then i saw blood dripping from her nose. my main goal was to get her to calm down enough that i could assess the damage. i gave her a towel to hold on her face while i tried to check out the rest of her body for injury. now while she was screaming, mason came over to check things out and had latched on to my legs with sympathy crying.

i pulled mason off my legs and left him screaming in the kitchen while i carried madelyn over to the couch for further evaluation. the first order of business was wiping off all the existing blood to see if she was still bleeding. she had stopped crying by this time and was willing to help me find all the blood on her body.

once i determined that the bleeding had stopped and there did not appear to be a serious injury here, i went to get the camera and take pictures for the blog - of course! her nose was already starting to turn a little purple so i started to reconsider how serious the injury might be. but she insisted that the only part of her nose that hurt was the underside where the cut was. here are some pictures of the immediate damage.

thankfully, it only looked bad for a day or so and is barely noticeable now. why does it always have to be her face?! love.

higher and higher

madelyn continues her training for mount everest by finding new ways to climb higher and higher. (matt is just off camera so don't worry about her falling. by the way she didn't fall, she got herself down safe and sound.) she tried to climb even higher after the picture, but couldn't get her foot to the window.

she has also realized that she can reach the water/ice dispenser part of the refrigerator. luckily she isn't quite tall enough to reach the controls - yet.

since she has learned that she can't open the fireplace doors, she looks for other ways that she can interact with the fireplace. today she tried scratching, climbing (pulling up on), and biting the stones. i think that she really loves the texture and cool feeling of the fireplace stones. i did add a blanket to cover the corners so that we don't have any more bloodshed. although, really, with madelyn i have the feeling there will be more in my future!

speaking of bloodshed... as you can see, even with her busted lip, madelyn is still a "pretty girl". she had a great night's sleep and a really great day! i was able to get a lot of work done because she is learning not to touch the things in my office that she shouldn't. plus, she played nicely in her crib while i had a video conference this afternoon. i was actually surprised that she did so well. this was the longest that she played in her crib without crying about being alone (and contained).

what can i say? madelyn was so good to me today! love.

bumps and bruises

one of the challenges of having a child who had a lot of teeth before they can even crawl is keeping those teeth from getting knocked out. madelyn had another tooth slamming adventure this morning. she was crawling around the living room while i ate breakfast and watched the morning news. she then got up on the laundry basket, walked/cruised over to the coffee table, and then to her toy basket under the table. she continued going between the coffee table and her toy basket in a 'walking' fashion getting toys out and putting them on the coffee table where she could better see, taste, and shriek at them. she was having so much fun that she started waving her hands around and let go - resulting in her top teeth hitting the edge of the coffee table on her way down.

this time i was more upset than she was. she cried initially, but as soon as i picked her up she was fine and started chewing on my fingers with no signs of pain. her gums were bleeding again around the same tooth where there was bleeding the last time she slammed her mouth like that (right before we went to Kansas when she was trying to crawl on the hardwood floors). there is still a little dark blood spot on her gums right above her right, front tooth from today's falls (yes, "falls" - plural - keep reading).

then when i went to pick her up from her nap i noticed the long scratch on her face that you can sort of see in the picture near her eye on the side of her face. after feeding her, i clipped her finger nails for the second time this week to try and limit the number of marks on her face.

and madelyn was not done injuring herself yet. her new thing is to crawl her hands up the walls so that she can stand leaning up against them, but the catch is that she can't figure out how to get down. i guess she was trying to get back down when i heard a thump and then crying. she had a nice red mark on center of her forehead the size of a quarter from where the wall texture scratched her a little on her way down (she caught herself during her fall and was just kneeling with her hands on the wall when i went to get her).

but, wait, there's more! at playgroup today she slipped while crawling on their hardwoods and knocked her tooth again!! there was a lot more blood this time, but she quickly recovered and was biting my finger as hard as she could while i was trying to figure out where the blood was coming from. its not like she isn't a stable kid. i think she was just so excited by everyone running around (there were about 11 kids between the ages of 3 and 5 months) and got ahead of herself.

her mouth started bleeding again tonight while she was chewing on her pack-and-play but best as i saw, she didn't hit her mouth again because there was no bang and no crying. what can i say, the girl is fearless and wants to try everything. i am just going to try and keep her scaring injuries to a minimum...

maddie's preferred method of communication today - shrieking. from the time she woke up until the time she went to sleep shrieking was the way in which madelyn expressed herself (she did throw in a few raspberries, grunts, "hi", "da", "ga", and nose snorts, but the day was mainly shrieking). i never know what she will sound like from one day to the next. here is a video of her shrieking today with her toys and the crawling to the newly discovered printer stand in my office and the 'fun' reams of paper underneath it.

yesterday she pulled an open ream of paper off the shelf, shook the paper out and proceeded to play with the plastic wrapper. of course i had to be the party pooper who threw it away.

hopefully, tomorrow will be much less bloody! love.