Bumps And Bruises And Living Life To The Fullest

Olette has two skinned knees and a nasty bruise on her side. The bruise she got from running through the house and trying to go through the coffee table instead of around it. The skinned knees? Goodness knows-- she gets new bumps, scrapes, and scratches on those knees just about every day.

Ben has two skinned knees, and the one of the nastiest skinned elbows I've seen in a while. I'm not sure how one of the skinned knees happened (in my parental defense, neither is he), but the other, and the skinned elbow, came from his most recent bicycle wreck. And the bicycle wrecks happen most often during bicycle races.

So why doesn't Ben stop racing on his bicycle? And why doesn't Olette slow down and watch where she's going when she runs through the house? Well, probably for the same reason that, when I was little, I kept climbing trees (even though I still have a scar from the time I fell out of one and sliced my leg open when my shoelace got tangled in the chain link fence under the tree), racing on bicycles or rollerblades (I really can't count the number of spills I took doing that... and we won't even mention the brief rollerblades = ice skates "figure skating" phase I went through during the '94 Winter Olympics... turns out, asphalt = NOT ice), and, well, quite honestly in my case, just trying to put one foot in front of the other (I've never been very graceful).

At some point, we become cautious. We don't rush headlong into things the way we used to. We slow down to make sure doors are open before we attempt to charge through them (or risk becoming the subject of a viral video when we don't). We look before we leap. We assess the amount of risk involved before speeding around a tight curve, leaning over almost all the way to the ground on our bicycles (cough, Ben, cough). But you know what those 20-years-ago versions of us would probably call ourselves if we ran into each other? Boring.

We might have been covered in bumps and bruises and scrapes and scratches and cuts, but we were squeezing every little bit of living out of every single day. And, while I can't escape all the pressures and responsibilities of being a grown-up, I hope I never, ever forget how to live like my kids do: like the various accumulated boo-boos and ow-ies  are trophies-- proud proof that I wasn't just sitting on the benches. It's been a long time since I've gone out and gotten some good bumps and bruises of my own.