Klutz of the Highest Degree

If you ask my parents and brother, I'm sure they'd be happy to regale you with tales of my clumsiness from days gone by. I started off clumsy and haven't improved much with time. (I did manage to live almost 28 years prior to actually breaking a bone, though.) I find bruises I can't explain. I get scratches from walking into stationary objects that have been in the same place, in the same house, for years. Yet I still continually find them, with my thighs, elbows, arms, knees, and other random body parts.

Tonight, I achieved a new, strange way to hurt myself. I made the bed. I had washed the sheets today and was reassembling the bedding when I managed to, as I would tell my son, "give myself an owie." As I was snapping the topsheet to get it evenly distributed and less wrinkled, I snapped too hard. My left hand accidentally let the sheet go and was flung against our footboard. I now have a bruise on the middle knuckle of my pointer finger. And it hurts to bend it. I had to laugh at what a klutz I am.

The bruise got me to thinking (which is even more dangerous than bed-making!) I wonder if my knucklehead will be as clumsy as me. It terrifies me to think as such. You see, as a little kid, I was clumsy, but I was gunshy (which probably saved me many injuries.) I didn't become relatively fearless until I was older. My son, on the other hand, is currently utterly and completely fearless. Today, for example, he fell off a wall at a playground. (For the record, I was two steps away but he walked off the wall before I could grab him.) He landed on the woodchips below and I could instantly tell he wasn't physically injured. After a couple of stunned seconds, he began to whine. I think it was surprise as opposed to pain. I immediately picked him up, which instantly quieted him (thus proving me right that he wasn't hurt or in pain.) Then, he did the most fearless thing possible. He tried to squirm out of my arms in order to do it again! Needless to say, I kept him in my arms and we left.

Clumsy is bad (though often funny.) Fearless can be good, but can have it's downside as well. Clumsy plus Fearless only equals one possible solution: TROUBLE!