"Wow, that was miraculous."

Our son gets hurt, and he has prompted me to give him my “avoidable accident” versus “accident” speech. I won’t go into details because I will assume you know where I am heading with that lecture.

 

Yes, there are accidents. You drop a plate, you may even crash your car after hitting an icy patch. Avoidable accidents happen because of a total disregard for the rules of safety or the warning of a parent.  As a parent, you end up right, but painfully so because the cat is now rewarded with half his hair missing. 

 

However, my son has invented a third group that I have no idea how to categorize. But I will try. For now, I will call it the “miraculous accident.” This kind of accident does not occur from negligence nor happenstance, but because you are so talented, that you create your own kind of accident. No one is really at fault, it is your own Kharmic power that leads you to have an accident that no one possibly could have envisioned. It is so stealth, that it almost didn’t happen. So rare, that the last time it may have occurred was to a Triceratops during the Jurassic Era when the dinosaurs reigned.

 

Case in point. We were calmed by knowing our son had his 30 minute piano lesson. It was a window of time when he could not possibly get hurt. But our calm was misguided. To this day, I am not sure what happened, nor could his teacher explain. But he came running to us in the next room, hysterical and with a goose egg on his head. Yes, you guessed it. He got a near concussion during a piano lesson. 

 

I bet you were thinking carpel tunnel or maybe a back injury. That would make sense. Or that the piano collapsed mysteriously. OK, but no, this was a natural occurrence causing his lesson to be reduced to the safer program of teaching music theory on the couch. 

 

Then there is the typical, hungry child issue. They get engrossed with whatever they are doing and forget they are starving. Then, they realize it and are willing to eat anything in front of them. Good time to slip in vegetables, but I have learned that finger food is a bad time for this ravenous moment because our son has, multiple times, bitten his own hand. 

 

A finger got lost in the ketchup and chicken nuggets. A pinky disguised itself as fried zucchini sticks. I don’t know, but the shock on his face when he thought the dog had jumped up on the table and bit his hand, and it was actually his own mouth. 

 

We can all imagine that. The realization that one of the worst attacks on you in your six years was when you bit yourself. It could force you to never eat finger food again. Unfortunately, he does not have the patience for forks at this time, so he will keep having to take risky chances at each meal. 

 

Accidents happen. All of the time. We are human. We do ridiculous things, and cause them. Parents included. But instead of getting upset when you see a once in a lifetime accident where no one gets seriously hurt, document it, savor it, marvel at the rarity and sheer timing of such a milestone. Because even though you never want it to happen again for fear of making your piano teacher take out liability insurance, you have to respect how it made your jaw drop on the floor.