High Jinks & Head Injuries

Joshua is generally a pretty active chap and enjoys running about the place like a crazy person, occasionally flinging himself on or off of things that I would prefer he did not fling himself on or off of. This is generally pretty disconcerting as he narrowly avoids a plethora of potential disasters by mere millimetres – disasters which appear obvious to the concerned bystander, but seemingly incomprehensible to the willing participant.

He’s very much at the age now that you can tell him 100 times that if he falls off the back of the sofa / the ladder / the worktop / the roof he will hurt himself, but that advice will be completely ignored as nonconstructive fun-wrecking misery until he actually falls off aforementioned platform. At which point you must avoid the temptation of saying ‘I told you so’, as that would be horribly immature and unsupportive. Instead you must explain that perhaps daddy wasn’t telling you not to climb up the electricity pylon because he’s a fun-wrecking knob but because he was worried that you might break if you fell off.

He seems to have accepted the fact that his ‘head might fall off’ as a semi-decent reason not to do something after repeatedly telling him that if he falls off {insert stupidly high object here} his head might fall off and then he wouldn’t be able to eat food any longer. The thought of not being able to eat food ever again is quite a powerful deterrent it would appear. At least for now!

Joshua also HAS TO help out with whatever we happen to be doing at the time, be it hoovering, washing, gardening, DIY, cooking, nuclear fusion, splitting the atom, or curing cancer. Not only does he have to ‘help’ with the task in hand he generally has to take over the task in hand, to the point where your own role becomes one of purely helping him to do the thing that was formerly your own task and preventing him from maiming himself whilst doing it.

‘But surely you should just tell him that the task is not safe or age appropriate for him’.

Yeah.

Hilarious.

So you’re there in the garden helping him do the inappropriate job that he has somehow taken over doing and grappling with him to get the chainsaw / axe / pneumatic drill / flame-thrower out of his hand before he destroys something / someone. When suddenly a bit of random concrete flies up from the area you’re innocently raking and smacks him right in the middle of the forehead.

Much like the rock that David throws at Goliath’s head, but instead of gently falling to the ground like Goliath, Joshua’s head decides to pour blood out like an elephant taking a much-needed piss. So having managed to keep him in one piece for 3 years from a variety of self-inflicted near-disasters, he is finally taken down by a random piece of flying concrete that was completely unpreventable and not actually his fault!

After a decent whack of glue squirted on by the friendly paramedic, all was again well in the world, apart from the lovely U-shaped scar that he is likely to be left with. Slightly Harry Potter-esque but a bit less flashy. We’ve just got to keep it dry and undisturbed for 7 days now. Easy peasy…

To prevent future gardening disasters, it looks like I will now have to undertake all gardening tasks on a Monday when he is at nursery. Meaning that our garden plans should now be complete just in time for him to head off to university. Super.