At some point as a parent, you are going to have to see the one thing you really wish you didn’t have to: your kid is going to hurt themselves and they’re going to start bleeding.
Put it off as long as you like but it is going to happen that they’ll have a little trip or bang and you’ll have to get yourself together as you play doctor or nurse.
And no matter whether you put a crash helmet on your kid’s head, refuse to let them leave the house or swaddle them in rolls and rolls of cotton wool – there is simply no way to avoid it.
When my son Jacob was about nine months old, he slipped in the ceramic bath of the house we were renting at the time and banged his tooth off the inside of his lip.
He let out a cry so loud that my heart sank and I quickly had to brush away the instant over-dramatic thought that I had, as I suspected I would at some stage, broken him.
Once over that nonsense, my heart really did sink as I saw blood starting to spill from his mouth, over the side of the bath and onto the floor as I grabbed him out.
I held him wrapped in a towel on the floor for a good ten minutes while he eventually calmed down and the blood stopped.
But me? I was bawling for at least another hour. I was just so upset that my baby was hurt in any way.
Ultimately, Jacob was fine and has had plenty of other tumbles since. But it was his first tumble, and I hated it.
Yesterday, my one-and-a-half year old daughter tried to race her big brother out of the playground and face-planted into the gravel after about seven steps.
She wailed so loudly that I knew blood was coming. I knew.
Her little top lip had burst and she and I were both covered in blood by the time we got back to the car.
I cleaned her up and got her home for some flogs and to inspect her new Angelina Jolie-esque bee-stung lips.
She’s fine.
And me? This second-time mamma didn’t cry even once.
I am now officially a parenting BADASS.
Do you find you’re getting a bit ‘stronger’ about your kid’s tumbles and falls? Join the conversation on Twitter @HerFamilyDotie
