Wounded in action

One of the seldom-discussed dangers of parenting a small boy with big impulse control problems is that sometimes one of his impulsive, unpredictable movements connects forcefully with an unsuspecting part of your body. When my son was little, it was usually a matter of his head whipping back when he was sitting on my lap and catching me square on the nose. Last night, it was my left eye that got walloped by that very hard head. I was crawling into a playtent at his insistence, and he decided to lunge forward quickly as I was creeping forward slowly, and the tent not providing a lot of leeway for sudden movement, eye and head met with painful force. I saw stars then, and lots of floaters and flashes this morning, and so spent most of the afternoon in the waiting room of the opthalmologist, watching soap operas and listening to senior citizens complain about the wait. I can now tell you, if you've never had the experience and might at some future time think to try, that the things the doctor does to check for a detached retina are way more uncomfortable than anything you might have done to detach it in the first place. At least the doctor got a good laugh when he asked me what I got hit in the eye with, and I had to confess that it was a small boy's head. "Watch out for small boys," he said. And, oh man, I'm tryin'.