Smashy Smashy

To experience life as Elijah Hamann, do the following: Drink 7-8 glasses of beer. Then run at top speed with your arms above your head, and smash into as many things as possible, aiming for the pointiest things in your house.

Now that Eli is fully walking, I have no idea how he makes it through the day without knocking himself out. He’ll take two steps, then, wham! Falls on his face on our kitchen floor. Take two steps, wham! Crashes into the bookshelf. Wham! Into the footrest. Wham! Into the dog.

But you know what? He doesn’t care. He takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’. He usually laughs it off, not acknowledging the bruises that litter his knees hands face and butt.

Last night, however, his luck ran out. I was upstairs with him doing bedtime duty. My story was I was going back to work and wouldn’t be able to see Eli as much. But my real reason was I didn’t want to cook dinner and sitting upstairs playing “Let’s kiss the stuffed animals” was a much better alternative.

He was running back and forth across the room, laughing like a lunatic and generally irritating the crap out of Grover. I watched him race towards our bed and, whoops, he tripped, falling head first into our wooden bed frame. Luckily, the blow was semi-absorbed by our quilt but it still made enough of an impact that I rushed across the room.

It was one of those grenade cries. You know, where they silently count to three before exploding. Oh man did he explode. I held him and let him shriek into my ear, red faced. I checked him over for any real damage. He wasn’t bleeding or gashed. I think he was just mad at the universe for putting that damned bed in the way of his running.

He completely forgot he was hurt two minutes later and resumed his crashing into the baby gate.