It must have been the next Thanksgiving (I’m beginning to wonder if we get just a tad careless around holiday time or distracted by visitors?), that our next mishap occurred. My youngest son was happily carrying the youngest around, she was all of ten months. He was showing off his inherited, beefy, cowboy strength by running with her (not in my sight I must hurriedly add), when he tripped and fell on her…apparently, I wasn’t there, remember, to witness the scene, the truth came out years later! For the next ten days I could not understand why this good humoured baby had turned into a grizzling monster, grumpy doesn’t do it as an adjective. Coincidentally, though we didn’t know this, she developed a fever and we treated her for an ear infection. After ten days when she cried out while I was putting her arm in a cardigan sleeve, I decided we had to go to the doctor, this time to look at her left arm not in her ears. He x-rayed her arm and diagnosed a partially healed broken forearm.
Oh what bad parents. Someone placated me in my guilt ridden grief with a story about a family who had left their son’s broken leg undetected for weeks, and he was a toddler! Some parents are much worse than others.