Bruiser

Why does John look like he's been in a bar fight? It all started Wednesday morning, when he fell off his changing table. Jumped off, actually -- kind of like a scuba diver who sits on the edge of a boat and then rolls backward into the water. That might have been bad enough, but he managed to smack his head on the LeapFrog table on the way down, resulting in the now-yellow bruise over his eyebrow.

The experience was pretty scary at the time, but kind of funny looking back -- the well-meaning nurses kept asking me questions like "Is his vision blurry?" (how can we tell?) and "Does he stumble when he walks?" (yes, but he does that anyway!). And we were instructed to wake him up every 4 hours for the next two nights, making sure that he could talk and walk. Oh, and sleep on the floor of his room. Um, yeah. Sure. Thankfully, he didn't seem to have any major injuries and the bruise was really the worst of it.

I avoided taking pictures, thinking that if I waited a few days and the swelling went down, that I could convince myself 20 years from now that it really wasn't that bad.

And then on Friday he managed to connect his eyelid -- of the same eye! -- with the corner of the desk. At least that's what I think happened. Either way, he now has a purple-black streak over his eye. So I figured that if he was going to have his first black eye at just shy of 17 months, there might as well be documentation of it.