Our Goose was born to be a jumper.  As a baby, she loved the jolly jumper, would bounce up and down in the exersaucer all day long, and hopped long before she could walk.  We thought our bouncy little girl was pretty cute, until we noticed some slightly unpleasant side effects. Little things like her habit of jumping full bore on to us when we were most vulnerable, like when we were sleeping, or when our most sensitive bits were left unprotected from sharp little elbows and knees.  We tried to teach her to restrain herself, but she was rarely successful.

As Goose got older, we began to notice that her jumping behaviour got more and more daring.  She started just launching herself from the top of the stairs without caring if you were ready to catch her or even facing her, which often meant a high speed piggy back landing.  She also became even more daring around water.  She LOVES to leap into the water, and seldom waits until the catcher is ready for her. She has also been known to launch herself off the dock at the cottage, causing parental scrambles on more than one occasion. Now that we are in the pool most days, her leaps mean that I get a face full of Goose, or that I have to pull a sputtering girl’s head above water.  I am fairly certain that this is the leading cause of my latest crop of gray hair.

This past week she took her leaps to a whole new level.  A level up, as it were.

We stopped by Woo’s best friend’s house at the end of our last full day in Ottawa.  It was meant to give the boys one last short playtime and say our final goodbyes.  We headed into the backyard, as C was anxious to show us the family’s latest project, the tree house.  The boys clamoured up the ladder and hung out on the platform for a few minutes, until Goose asked for demanded her turn.  They came down and she headed up the ladder with a little help from mom.  Pleased as punch, she danced and played for a few minutes, then asked to come down.

She was afraid to turn and go down the ladder, so I reached up to help her down.  As I opened my mouth to say “don’t jump”, she jumped. She jumped from a platform that was roughly six and a half feet off the ground; launched herself straight at me.  I was in no way ready for her, but somehow caught her.  I caught her and then stumbled backwards, over a pot full of dirt and we went down. We hit our knees, then elbows, then finally poor Goosie’s head on the pavement.

Goose started screaming, I started triaging, and our poor friends were in shock.  We got some ice on her, and I did a quick assessment to see that she was OK*.  Her head barely touched the ground, and after twenty minutes, I felt confident enough to bring her home for further monitoring.  She scared a few years off of my life, but suffered no ill effects.  It seems that I actually bore the brunt of the damage, ending up with a number of gaping wound, bruises, and the scar of another fall that ended in a knock to the head.  I think we have had just about enough of those.

*In their short lives, the lils have had more than their share of head injuries, enough that I no longer have to look at the checklist that the lochildren’s hospital gave to us on our first visit for a head injury (http://lilbunnyrabbitz.com/2011/07/21/haunted/). The list is memorized.