From a month ago

Yesterday evening I was trying to unload the dishwasher in a hurry before I put the dink to bed, since the clanging of the dishes makes so much noise. He was fed, bathed, and smiling, playing with the fridge toys Aunt M gave him. I was on a roll, grabbing dishes in both hands and throwing them into the appropriate drawers and cabinets. And I guess the dink wanted to help, because he crawled over to me and perched on the outside of my left leg. The dishwasher was on my right. I grabbed a 2-cup Pyrex measuring glass in my left hand and a small glass bowl in my right. I turned to the left, about to reach over to a cabinet, when I realized he was beneath me. And then I lost it. I wish I had a video of what happened next because I’ve lost all sense of memory since.

Somehow the Pyrex crashed into the bowl, glass on glass. Then they became airborne for a split second and finally crashed a millimeter away from that little dink, shattering into about a million pieces. I looked down in shock and saw the dink literally sitting in a sea of glass—countless slivers and mean-looking shards, enclosing him in a menacing circle. He was stunned, not even crying, and I snatched him up, ran out of the kitchen and held him under the dining room light, looking for injuries. But he was fine. I couldn’t find anything but a tiny glass sliver sitting on the puff of blond hair on top of his head. He was 100% unscathed and eager to get back in the kitchen and play in the mess.

I still don’t understand how it happened—how I didn’t step on him, how the glasses crashed together, and how pieces of glass landed on every surface of the kitchen floor, even on the counters and in the sink and dishwasher, but yet my precious baby managed to sit in the middle of it all, unharmed. I suppose these are the near-misses that you hear about, that will keep happening every year of the dink’s life—some I’ll see, some I’ll be better off for not knowing about—just one more reminder of how precious his life, my life, this life, is.