Sunday night, after our lovely week away on vacation (more on that to follow), we were getting Tau ready for bed. After pouring his milk as he played on the living room floor, I turned to reach for a lid for his cup. And in that time, Tau clambered up and started jumping like a monkey on the cream armchair. The one he knows he’s not allowed to jump on. As I went to drag him off, he dove sideways off the chair to get away and cracked his head on the media center.

Long story short, we spent an hour at the local emergency room where “man” (the nurse) cleaned the wound above his eye and “yady” (the ER doctor) used some super-special surgical superglue to fuse the three-quarter-inch gash closed.

That’s one tough little kid we’ve got. After the initial shock of cracking his head — screaming out of sheer toddler fury, followed by puking half his dinner due to being worked up by the crying — he was little Mr. Charming. Chatted and sang songs all the way through ER admission and treatment. “Yady? Yady doing? …. Man going!?” And showing off the bulldozers on his shirt to the nurse.

When the doctor brought him the handmade stuffie you see in the picture above, he took one look at its slanty eyes and informed us, “Baby crying!” And when Dave asked him what the baby’s name was, he pronounced, “Taco.”

So, Taco it is. The superglue apparently flakes off after a week or so, once the wound has healed.

By the time we got home at 9:45 p.m., he was overtired and cranky. As Dave did the dinner dishes, I lay next to Tau on our bed and soothed him, ran through the story again:

“You were jumping on the chair, and then you fell and got an owie on your head. And so we went to the hospital, and the nurse washed your owie and the doctor fixed your owie and gave you Taco. No jumping on the chair, Tau. No jumping on the chair, OK?”

“Fan?”

Fan? The ceiling fan above our heads.

I have a feeling that more visits to the ER are in our future.*

* Case in point, see the little bit of dried blood in his nostril in the top picture? Just before I took this picture, he was jumping on the couch and bumped his nose. Sigh.