Communal dinner at Brynne's

Brynne is back in town, on holiday from her East Coast business school adventure, and hosted an "Old Skool communal dinner, inviting the whole crowd over for dinner. I think unfortunately her dinner was less "old school" where everyone brought something and the host cooked only the main dish, and more "new school" where one person does all of the cooking. Well, unfortunate may be the wrong word. She spent a lot of time cooking. If she enjoys it as much as I enjoy cooking, it wasn't really that unfortunate.

What WAS unfortunate, however, was Meter's spectacular nose dive into the coffee table. Except it wasn't really a nose dive, so much as a gum dive into the table, and I feel about 1" tall about it.

Earlier in the evening, I had managed to snag Meter from the ice bucket she was playing in, where she had snagged a giant ice cube and was sucking it down. She was doing a good job of melting the cube in her mouth, losing it only a couple times to dump it down my shirt (brrrrrrr!) or on my pants.

When the ice cube was done, Meter wanted to walk downstairs, so down we went, to find Brynne's mom and toys, toys, toys! Fun! We played with the boxes and the stars for a few minutes until Meter just turned around from what she was doing, and threw herself into my arms, scrambling up my lap and into my arms.

Although I found the move adorable and endearing, it confused me, too. When I set her down, she immediately scrambled back up into my arms and held on tight.

Ohhhhhhh..... kaaaaaaaaay. Adorable kid, you're confusing me.

I took her upstairs to hand Meter to Mark and ask if this was a sign for something, anything, or was she just being cute?

Mark let me know she was just being Meter, and that she was fine. He set her down, and walked away to be social with some group. I watched Meter as she stood up and started walking towards a glass coffee table.

Now, earlier in the evening, I had a conversation with Katie about learned helplessness, and how many children in today's society can't do anything because their parents do EVERYTHING for them. There's no sense of try, there's no resourcefulness. There's only this prevasive helplessness that will be the death of this society.

As Meter started walking towards the table, I had a HUGE urge to pick her up and turn her away from the table. I had horrible visions of her falling into the table. I recalled the conversation from before, and thought, let the kid go, she'll be fine. At this point, she was only about 8" from the table, she'd be fine.

Until she tripped.

And wasn't fine.

Her forehead hit the table corner, bounced and her upper gums hit the corner again. Her arms went just under the table, missing the save.

HOLY CRAP. I swooped in and grabbed her before she even knew she was hurt, and picked her up. She started crying and screaming, I turned and thrush her into Mark's arms, while people in the other room called out to me, "Kitt, what did you do now?"

I felt so bad. Beyond bad. Horribad.

Meter had cut her upper gum and was bleeding a lot. Mark calmed her down, stopped the bleeding and held her for a while. Me? I just wanted to be very, very small.

And gone.

Even earlier in the evening than all of this, I had also managed to break one of Brynne's mother's chairs, when I put my feet on the rung that seemed footrest-ish when I put my feet on them. The loud CRACK! when I propped my feed up let me know how mistaken I was about the chair, with the deafening silence that followed letting me known that everyone else knew it, too.

With the chair incident and Meter's crash, I was no longer in a holiday, social mood, wanting just to crawl under that rock over there (right over there, see it?) and hide, so I left early. Hopefully I'll time my visit at Mark and Megan's housing warming this weekend with Brynne's and have the opportunity to catch up with her.

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