Have you ever felt a certain discomfort taking your constantly bruised child to the pediatrician? My little boy was always into some venture of his own making and, having a tendency of bruising easily, often looked like a Dalmatian.

Let alone the time I left him male bonding with his dad while preceding them back home with his younger sisters from a vacation on the mountains, when he fell from a branch of a dead tree that broke under his bouncing weight… The little rascal was keen to get physically into trouble and his little body was a constant reminder of his exploits.

At 18 months, while still living in the city, my toddler managed to swallow a largish button I had set aside on a high shelf; to this day I have NO idea of how he was able to get to it! I run him to the emergency room where they made sure the button had gone through him the right way and told me I would eventually find it at the exit end…While I was collecting the results my little fellow busied himself opening every door around us and chatting the nurses. I was reassuringly told, “To next time, Mrs. B!” At two, as soon as we moved from the city to the suburbs my guy broke his front baby teeth coming down from a slide face first. Then there was the time when while running on a little friend’s backyard he fell bumping his head on a stone step requiring several stitches, from a plastic surgeon, no less. Not to speak of his brilliant idea, around four, of jumping into the low end of a pool head first, hitting the bottom of the pool and braking several front teeth-yet again!- two days before leaving to Italy for the summer. Around 12 while riding a horse with his dad (am I repeating myself?), he had a difference of opinion with his equally dunderhead mount about from which side to pass a large, thorny bush…when I went to pick him up after the ride, I didn’t have to ask who had won!

You will understand my discomfort when once, at the pediatrician office, the doctor called, “Sue, look at these!”, for his nurse to witness my daredevil’s several bruises?! Thank goodness the pediatrician and Sue had known me for a couple of years by then, and didn’t call the police on me for child abuse, yet. The reality is that the abused one was I, the poor mother, always on alert, concerned and suspicious of my darling boy next move!