So, a week ago Sunday (it’s been a week already? ugh) we were at church, where we often are on Sunday mornings, that being the customary time for being at church. After the service and subsequent meeting, I was bundling myself so that I could, in turn, bundle Linnaea. In order to don my coat, I set Linnaea on the pew with our stuff. She was quite happy to be sitting there, but due to the fuzzy nature of her pants, and the combination of low static friction coefficients of said pants and the wood pew, and her relatively low normal force, her butt slid out to the side and she wound up lying on the pew.

So, as is her wont, she rolled over and got up on her hands and knees. She hasn’t (as of this writing, though expect a post to the contrary soon, I wager) quite figured out the mechanics of crawling. She rocks, and she moves her knees, but the hands tend to remain firmly planted. The result, bearing in mind the previously noted frictional properties, is that she scoots or slides backwards. After awhile she had traversed the entire length of the pew, in reverse, and now had her feet against the end of the pew. Ah, thought I, she cannot slide back any further. Perhaps now she will be able to work on forward locomotion. And so she did.

Linnaea’s legs are strong. She likes jumping. If she could run, she’d make a good sprinter, at least off the blocks. She pushed off, thrusting her body forward, but the hands, they remained planted. The final result was that Linnaea performed a faceplant into the pew that would do an Olympic snowboarder proud. The usual utterance of “Oh, bonk!” in happy tones did nothing to quell the wailing from my tender offspring. I picked her up, comforted her, and then inspected for damage. She appeared to be okay, except her cheek was red, as if it had been abraded or bruised from the impact. Which was odd, I thought, as I had expected her nose to have taken the brunt of the fall. Then I saw the blood on her thumb.

Linnaea had just learned that having teeth can be a danger to one’s own person, not just to those of others (see discussion below regarding nursing equipment). She had apparently bitten her upper lip with both of her bottom teeth. The red on her cheek was blood that she had smeared after sucking on her thumb. So, I carried my bleeding baby downstairs to where Mater was packing up from the meeting, and called her over to share in her daughter’s first wounding. Not to be cheated of sympathy from one of her parental units, Linnaea began crying again when Mater came over. We cleaned her up and everything was fine, but her lip remained swollen for the rest of the day and looked awful. We had intended to take a picture, but didn’t get to it in time. The wound looked much better the next day, of course, and was completely healed a very short time thereafter. So, no longer is Linnaea’s lip on the list of things broken.