Last night, my husband almost ended up in the emergency room. Shockingly, however, it wasn’t me who nearly put him there. Instead, it was our daughter – and her toy bow.
It was bedtime, which is almost always when the bad things start to happen. My daughter was fighting us on going to sleep, just like every other night. In an attempt to distract her, my husband apparently offered to let her play – “just once!” – with her toy bow and arrow (an item, of course, that I had previously told BOTH of them to never play with in the house – but I digress…)
Needless to say, two seconds later, my daughter rushes out of the room and yells, “Mommy! Come! I hurt Daddy!” Incredulous that such a thing could happen, I gingerly approached the room, where I found my husband lying flat on his back in the middle of the floor.
At first, I thought I had walked onto the scene where Marlon Brando kicks the bucket in The Godfather, but I quickly processed that my husband was fortunately still breathing so it couldn’t have been that bad. He opened his mouth and, sure enough, a chunk of his front tooth was missing. Just gone. No sign of it anywhere.
I turned to my daughter, who saw in my eyes that now was not the time for jokes. Words spilled out of her about how they were playing with the bow, she accidentally flung it halfway across the room, and, as luck would have it, she had – for the second time in her life – absolutely perfect aim.
I say “second” because once before – at a mere 18 months old – my daughter clocked ME in the mouth as well, that time with her head. Did she even flinch? Nope. Did I?
Well, I needed a root canal due to nerve damage from trauma so…. since they say good things happen in threes, who wants to go next?