On Sunday night, we had dinner and a playdate with friends.  The little angel and her friend A. were having a grand old time.  So were we.  We were drinking wine, trying to watch the children, trying to discuss normal adult things, and those two activities so do not go together.  I was standing at the kitchen counter looking through the diaper bag when I heard R. say "Oh, oh, oh!" 

I turned around and saw the little angel falling head over heels down the stairs. It was like stop-gap motion, and I, like Will Ferrell in Old School after he's taken an animal tranq to the main artery, fell over myself trying to reach her.

I've always been afraid of the little angel falling down stairs. Long after other friends abandoned their kid gates, we've kept ours up at the top AND the bottom of our lethal hardwood staircase.  Since we've had the gates up, I've actually fallen down the stairs twice in my socks. They are slippery. They are HARD.  I had a nasty bruise each time after I fell, and I sort of have this Million Dollar Baby nightmare that she'll fall down, hit her neck the wrong way, become a quadraplegic and bite through her tiny tongue in a hospital bed after I try to convince her to go to junior college instead of boxing ever again.

So anyway, she fell down a flight of carpeted stairs.  She didn't break her neck. She actually sort of landed on her feet.  There was an adult very close to where she landed.  I rushed over, trying to contain the roiling panic threatening to give me a heart attack, and scooped her up, covering her with lipstick kisses. 

She cried for about thirty seconds, then noticed A. was back to the toys and demanded "DOWN!"  I tried very hard to be cool. My fear had finally been realized.  And she did live through it.  After that, in fact, we spent several trips up and down the stairs teaching her to go down backwards (something that's been hard to teach on hard, pointy hardwood stairs), and she thought that was great fun.  I think it was Vickie Iovine who wrote in one of the Girlfriend's Guide books that God gives you a free one.  I think that was ours.