My mom says she lived in constant fear of being turned in to CPS because my face was either marred by a goose egg in the middle of my forehead, or two black eyes when the goose egg was draining. I walked into EVERYTHING!
Not to worry. Your child is assured a promising career as an Insurance Claims Adjuster.

not to worry.
your "unbalanced" baby girl will outgrow her unsteady days. soon you'll look back and marvel that that was all you had to worry about. As a mom, single or otherwise, there will ALWAYS be something to worry about........even when she's grown up! funny spin on the topic. I enjoyed it.

We had some two other couples (and their two kids each) over to dinner one afternoon. I went into the kitchen to do some duty or other, while the rest lounged around the backyard, the kids playing near our barn with with balls, sticks, whatever was at hand. I turned away from the screened-in porch to do something, turned back, and saw all five outdoor-adults running in perfect radial paths towards the silent riding mower by the barn. I remembered my son Devin had been sitting on it a moment ago, and lo, there he was, laying on the ground next to it. He'd done a perfect tumble from the seat to the ground, and the wails were just beginning.

With his being two years old, and our second child, and my confidence that there was nothing sharp or worrisome on the ground he might have fallen onto, and that all the mower's sharp stuff was well protected on its underside...and that he had five adults converging on him to evaluate him...I was pretty sure this was a 1.2 on the Child Emergency Richter Scale. I just opened the screen door and called out "Any permanent damage?"

He was fine.

Our older son Aidan taught us a neat lesson about pain and wounds and what it means to a kid - versus to my wife and I, the sometimes over-reactive parents.

Aidan was about 3 and 1/2, and Kris was taking him out to the car, which involved going down about eight concrete stairs to the driveway. Then, suddenly, there she was coming back in the door with a crying kid on her shoulder, because he had taken a header on the stairs and walloped his nose and lip. Lots of blood and tears and a worried mom.

So we propped him up on the kitchen counter, started saying soothing, reassuring things in our strained terrified voices, while wiping him carefully with wet paper towels.

The bleeding slowed down, but he kept on crying, and we kept saying nice things, and he kept on crying, and it finally quirked me as a little odd and I asked him carefully, "Are you crying because it hurts?" and he said "No! I want to go back outside!"

We laughed, finished wiping him up, and he was on his way.

A few more episodes like that taught me to ask two questions when one of my kids takes a header:

- Are you crying because it hurts or because it was a surprise? [Tripping, getting nipped by our dog, whatever the event was] More often than I would have guessed, they're crying out of surprise, not pain.

- When it *is* pain, I ask "Does it hurt a little or a lot?"

You'd think that cry-volume is already your perfect barometer of pain (and true, with some crash landings, you KNOW their terror is radiating right out of their DNA, amplified through their collective unconscious, focused by their brainstem and hind brain and piped directly into their vocal cords...so there's no reason to ask), but sometimes it's not. Dozens of times I've asked Aidan "Does it hurt a little or does it hurt a lot?" and he'd kind of check inside himself, and answer "A little" and his crying would taper off quickly after that.

I think the question makes him step back from the pain a tad, compare it to other hurts, and put it into little-kid-perspective. He's not a drama-queen kid, so it's not a trick to catch him being dramatic...it just seems to give him pause and - when it IS a small hurt - to not be overwhelmed by it.

And when he DOES answer "A lot" we know he means it, and not to minimize what he's feeling. It's worked out well.