Goodbye, Guilt

So, I took baby to the pediatrician in order to have them tell me the obvious: that baby is fine after her fall. Which means, in essence, that I went to a Western medical doctor as penance, seeking expiation. Toward that end, the pediatrician told me about leaving her week-old, first-born child swaddled in a corner of a couch. She left the room for all of a second and a half and when she returned the infant was in a different, and less safe, place on the couch. “How’d that happen?” she told me she thought. The nurse’s story was similar. She came into her two-year-old daughter’s room and saw her tumble from her crib ass-over-teakettle onto the floor. “We’re human,” their stories told me. I will put this behind me.

As for today’s highlights, I decided not to force the last of the peas and rice on the wee one, having seen her grimace take on a greater dimension of pain. She switched blithely enough to winter squash, though the meal wasn’t complete until the two of us had gotten an impressive quantity of the brilliant orange puree onto her grinning face.