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Our sweet Gracie has had a tough few days. Day before yesterday, she faceplanted on the floor. She ended up with a purple bruise on her sweet, baby cheek. Then yesterday, I was webcamming with Mom and Dad. (Maybe I wasn't being as attentive as I should've been. But you weren't there, so how can you know for sure?) Anyway, I heard a cry from behind me. Scooping her out from under the table, I noticed a bump forming on her sweet, baby forehead. Yikes, I thought. It's the same purple as the one on her cheek. My girl--accessorizing already.

Now, can you guess what happened tonight? Y'all are really smart. Jason had her in the bathtub. Her favorite thing to do now in the bath is to stand. No matter how many times we sit her back down, she stands. She was grumpy tonight, so as I was making dinner I asked Jason to let her play in the bath. Approximately one minute after he left to put her in the tub I heard his footsteps coming back down the hall into the kitchen. Here's Grace, wrapped in a towel with, Lord bless her, another, bigger bump on her forehead. It wasn't pretty. Right next to yesterday's bump.

"OH!", I said, my hands covered in raw ground meat. "Oh!" "Can you get the boo boo buddy?", Jason asked, sitting down in a chair with Grace. To the uninitiated, this is a boo boo buddy:

It's filled with gel and you keep it in your freezer. It comes in all different cute shapes and colors. I suppose the theory is that it's cuteness will make your kid go, "Sweet!! Please, mother or father, put the freezing cold butterfly/nemo/dinosaur on this sore, throbbing wound of mine. Nothing would give me greater joy." That is a really nice idea, isn't it? And I'm not knocking the Buddy. It's handy. But all of our kids hate, and I do not use that word flippantly, HATE having ice put on their bruises. If total world annihilation could be caused by the screams of a child, we would have all been toast back in about 2005 when we first tried icing Ava's sore noggin.

Grace wasn't crying hard till we put the boo boo buddy on her forehead. And then she was like, "I will cut all of you freaks if you don't get this freezing cold pink princess off of my head right now!" (I may be hyperbolizing just a little.) And then Ava and Nate started to get upset. I saw Nate's bottom lip start to protrude. His eyes filled with tears. He needed a mission. It's like in Sense and Sensibility, when Marianne is sick with fever and Colonel Brandon is pacing the floor and fretting and then he grabs Elinor and is all, "Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad!"

Okay, it wasn't much like that. "Nate!", I said. "Run upstairs and get Ava's teddy bear for Grace!" In what was a case of the world's worst timing ever, Grace's beloved bear was currently in the dryer. Nate ran off. We all like to feel useful, don't we? I sent Ava scurrying to find the children's pain reliever. All kidding aside, they were both very sweet, bringing her a huge and totally unnecessary assortment of stuffed animals and blankets. And after a few minutes of her livid screaming, we abandoned the boo boo buddy.

Once she calmed down, we decided to put her back in the bath. What? She needed one, and I didn't want her to be afraid of the bathtub. When Jason put her back in, he discovered she wouldn't release her kung fu grip on Ava's bear. So the bear went in the bath as well, and is next in line for the dryer.

Yes. My child has had three minor head injuries in three days. But as my neighbour Jules pointed out, three out of three ain't bad! So that's something.