So There

The sweet girl and I were out for a beautiful spring walk this afternoon when she tripped and fell. It was a pretty major trip (on a bit of busted sidewalk that had been pushed up higher than the walk around it by some big tree roots) and the concrete ripped right through her jeans. She got a scrape and fairly deep cut and of course she screamed.

Now my kid can scream, really scream. As someone at church said oh so politely when she scrunched a couple of sandal-clad toes in a heavy door, "she tends towards...hysteria...doesn't she?" Well, yes.

My initial response, of course, is to comfort her when she's hurt but then that's often chased by the need to try to get her to calm down and stop screaming bloody murder. When you're out on a street with other people and your kid is hollering that loudly, they tend to think there's a lot more wrong with her than just a scraped knee. This time around, we only had a couple of blocks to go till home, thank goodness. I carried her part of the way but then had to put her down (she's quickly catching up to me size-wise!) and let her limp/hop the final stretch to the door. She managed to punctuate at least every other hop with a loud agonized "Ow!"

Finally, in exasperation, I asked her to please be a little quieter. "I know it hurts," I said calmly, "but there's no need for you to scream like it's the end of the world."

She lifted an indignant, tear-stained face. "I know it's not the end of the world," she said. "And Mommy, I will NOT scream on the day the world ends. Because then we'll get a new heaven and a new earth and that's a GOOD thing."

Hee. So there.