Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My friend and I walked this morning, and she told me about putting her baby granddaughter in a kind of hammock her daughter has in her back yard, and somehow the baby flipped out and fell on the side of her face. Everyone was freaked out, and they took the baby to urgent care and spoke with their pediatrician and all was well. But it's pretty traumatic to feel responsible for your granddaughter's fall, and my friend was quite shaken. It's what all us grandparents dread, but with the normal outcome of no harm done. Luckily, babies are like jellyfish, and usually bounce back without disaster. When I was in Fiji, with my first child, a friend of my mother's had sent an infant seat, this was 52 years ago, and I put my son in it, and before I could strap him in, the seat flipped and fell on the floor with our big portable stereo coming down on top of it. I screamed, my husband came running, and the neighbor in the downstairs flat ran up and bundled us into the car to go to the emergency room. How relieved and grateful we were that he was absolutely fine. I never used that seat again, and never had one for my other three kids. But I never forgot how suddenly even little babies can move or twist. It's a wake up call to how on alert we must be.