Life As A Boy

It's all about the bumps and bruises. You hear the stories about boys, about "rough and tumble." I never imagined how true it would really be. I am a girl. When I was young I was not a frilly girl or an overly precious girl. But I was still a girl. I never imagined that the most fun my son would have would be to throw himself down on the bed, body slam, over and over and over again. I never imagined that he would love to be shaken and thrown and tossed around like a sack of potatoes; that this would be the surest way to get that hysterical belly laugh out of him.

AND I certainly never anticipated that at 14.5 mos old, my son would look like this:

On his left eye, the shiner is just fading. Can you see the tinge of green? Yeah, well, that is not just the picture. This was his 2nd black eye and it puts the 1st one to shame. This time the bruise is more than a run-of-the-mill black eye. It is a full, facial bruise about 4" long and 1" across and is the result of him basically jumping out of his crib. Just as it has started to fade (and I thought I was safe from the judgemental stares of other mothers at Target), he falls off the bottom step of our front porch and hits the walkway- face first. The raspberries... They look worse than they are and only the scratch by his mouth produced any blood, but still... The stares start again.