How we handle it.

Yesterday evening we had a bit of non-kindle/nook/amazon related mayhem around here. (This is a danger-related story but I'll take the fear element out of the story-- it turns out YaYa is totally okay.)

We are in our new apartment, which so far is peaceful, spacious, and the least dusty place I have lived in years. Leafy and Kid A were goofing off just the tiniest bit while I was cooking dinner and Chinua was working on the computer- piecing together a panoramic shot of our incredible view of the Annapurna range. All was well, but then Leafy fell into this wooden decorative screen/divider thing, which turned out to have an insufficient base.

It crashed onto the YaYa sister, who was folding origami on the cheesy-fancy glass coffee table, pushing her into the glass, which shattered when the giant heavy screen hit it. Chinua saw it happen, but was too far to prevent it. He jumped up, dumping the laptop on the ground, (turns out it is incredibly well-made, perhaps the only well-made thing in the story) and pulling the screen off of YaYa, with no idea how badly she was hurt.

Incredibly, wonderfully, miraculously, she is fine. She was inches away from all the shattered glass, and had the tiniest cut on her hand. Her eyebrow was scraped and swollen and part of it shaved away, and her lips were swollen and bleeding from where her teeth had cut through.

It was really scary. Chinua was shaken for most of the evening. I was in the kitchen making dinner, so by the time I saw her, she was already out from under the thing, but he really didn't know how badly she was hurt, when he ran to pick it up off of her.

It was weird, the way we all reacted. I say she was fine, because she wasn't cut badly, but she was crying, and bleeding, and a big thing landed on her head from behind, and she was worried about what the landlords would say about the crushed table. (My personal opinion is that we have saved them from the danger of bad taste... that thing is better off dead. Terrible table.)

Chinua swept up glass and cuddled YaYa. Kid A was really shaken and guilty and worried, which resulted in him drawing picture after picture, maniacally, lifting them up to show each one to us. He doesn't draw, usually, doesn't like it. I have to prod him to draw, while you practically can't peel the pencil out of YaYa's hand. I think it was his way of comforting her, but in the moment it came off as strange and inappropriate. We are wiping blood out of YaYa's mouth and he is lifting up a picture and saying "Look at this picture I drew. It is a boy throwing something into a glass table," and "this is YaYa eating a bowl of pasta," and so on.

Leafy went into autotalk mode. He is often quiet, but it was like he was unstoppered and he didn't stop talking for two hours, about everything he could think of. Solo was clueless. He was on the back porch looking at the mountains, and barely noticed anything had happened. And I felt very clearly that everyone would really fall apart if they didn't eat soon, so I kept cooking, running away from the stove every so often to kiss YaYa.

It's strange, isn't it? How we all deal with troubling things so differently?

On my parenting safety radar I already have glass bottles, marble edges, and small dogs in wagons. Now I will add strange heavy wooden screen thingies and glass tables.

As a side note, I know this is the most mommishly mommy thing ever, but I HATE glass-topped tables. So annoying. Why make a table out of something that can shatter? Why bevel cheesy designs into them? Why, why, why?

YaYa is fine today. The swelling is going down on her little duck lips. And she was well enough to draw this in the morning, lying on the floor on her stomach where the table used to be. She churns three of four of these kinds of things out a day. Crazy artist girl.

Bird detail.

I am so thankful she is okay. We love her so much.

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Thanks for all the congratulations and well-wishes on the book. Definitely let me know what you think as you begin to get your books and read them. And spread the word! This kind of thing is all about word of mouth.

Coming up: We're still waitiing on the Kindle version to show up in Amazon. CAN'T be much longer.

I'll start a facebook group soon, for book discussion.

And Chinua and I are working on a video of a reading. If I can get over my feeling of being ridiculous on video, it will be good, especially since I can't do any readings in person at the moment. (I do have a lot of reading-aloud practise, seeing as I read books and books and BOOKs to the kids.)