no more monkeys jumping on the bed

Last night we took my baby to the emergency room.

He fell off our bed and landed, what sounded to be, skull-first on the hardwood floor. Luckily, he's a quarter German and he has a thick skull otherwise maybe we wouldn't be so lucky.

He's at a stage when he wants to flirt with danger on the bed. He wants to get close enough to the steel headboard that he'll fall through the gap it makes with the mattress. He wants to run until he loses his footing in the bedding. He wants to jump. Only this time he was doing none of those things. He wasn't even standing. I don't know what he was doing but he managed to fall off in the approximately three seconds it took me to reach to the floor on the other side of the bed and get his milk for the last phase of his bedtime ritual. After hearing the worst sound ever, I was scared to death to turn around and see that he was no longer on the bed. I was hoping something had fallen in the other room. But he wasn't on the bed and it was with great relief that I soon heard the crying.

He didn't cry as long as I expected him too for the amount of pain I imagined he felt. I kept him up and busy while Ed called the nurse line to see what we should do. At that point he seemed fine but we didn't think we should let him go to sleep so soon after suffering a head injury. The nurse recommended we bring him to the emergency room just to be safe. So we did.

Every time I explained the story to someone at the ER, I imagined them tsk-tsking in their heads, thinking I was an abusive mother covering up some god-forsaken child abuse. I began to even second guess my own story, wondering if that really was how it happened. Was I really just reaching for milk? It all seems like a blur now. The good news is that he checked out just fine and we brought him home with just a Fred-Flinstone-like goose egg on his head (minus the circling birds) and instructions to watch him in the next 48 hours.

There's nothing like your baby falling off the bed when you're right there to prevent it to make you feel like a horrible mom. And that sound -- when his head came crashing to the floor -- it will forever be tattooed on my brain. Of course now that it's happened, if he so much as looks at something potentially dangerous, I steer him the other way. Which begs the question: Where is the line between being an over-protective parent who follows her child around with a safety net and letting him experience the simple joys of being a child like jumping on a bed, climbing, etc. without risking a cracked skull?

I sure as hell don't know.

Update: We just got home from a walk. As we passed through the park, three little boys were doing backflips off the picnic table. This motherhood thing is going to give me a nervous breakdown.