bumps and bruises

one of the challenges of having a child who had a lot of teeth before they can even crawl is keeping those teeth from getting knocked out. madelyn had another tooth slamming adventure this morning. she was crawling around the living room while i ate breakfast and watched the morning news. she then got up on the laundry basket, walked/cruised over to the coffee table, and then to her toy basket under the table. she continued going between the coffee table and her toy basket in a 'walking' fashion getting toys out and putting them on the coffee table where she could better see, taste, and shriek at them. she was having so much fun that she started waving her hands around and let go - resulting in her top teeth hitting the edge of the coffee table on her way down.

this time i was more upset than she was. she cried initially, but as soon as i picked her up she was fine and started chewing on my fingers with no signs of pain. her gums were bleeding again around the same tooth where there was bleeding the last time she slammed her mouth like that (right before we went to Kansas when she was trying to crawl on the hardwood floors). there is still a little dark blood spot on her gums right above her right, front tooth from today's falls (yes, "falls" - plural - keep reading).

then when i went to pick her up from her nap i noticed the long scratch on her face that you can sort of see in the picture near her eye on the side of her face. after feeding her, i clipped her finger nails for the second time this week to try and limit the number of marks on her face.

and madelyn was not done injuring herself yet. her new thing is to crawl her hands up the walls so that she can stand leaning up against them, but the catch is that she can't figure out how to get down. i guess she was trying to get back down when i heard a thump and then crying. she had a nice red mark on center of her forehead the size of a quarter from where the wall texture scratched her a little on her way down (she caught herself during her fall and was just kneeling with her hands on the wall when i went to get her).

but, wait, there's more! at playgroup today she slipped while crawling on their hardwoods and knocked her tooth again!! there was a lot more blood this time, but she quickly recovered and was biting my finger as hard as she could while i was trying to figure out where the blood was coming from. its not like she isn't a stable kid. i think she was just so excited by everyone running around (there were about 11 kids between the ages of 3 and 5 months) and got ahead of herself.

her mouth started bleeding again tonight while she was chewing on her pack-and-play but best as i saw, she didn't hit her mouth again because there was no bang and no crying. what can i say, the girl is fearless and wants to try everything. i am just going to try and keep her scaring injuries to a minimum...

maddie's preferred method of communication today - shrieking. from the time she woke up until the time she went to sleep shrieking was the way in which madelyn expressed herself (she did throw in a few raspberries, grunts, "hi", "da", "ga", and nose snorts, but the day was mainly shrieking). i never know what she will sound like from one day to the next. here is a video of her shrieking today with her toys and the crawling to the newly discovered printer stand in my office and the 'fun' reams of paper underneath it.

yesterday she pulled an open ream of paper off the shelf, shook the paper out and proceeded to play with the plastic wrapper. of course i had to be the party pooper who threw it away.

hopefully, tomorrow will be much less bloody! love.