The fall: In drawings.

I’m practically a ninja.

That’s what I tell myself anyway.

15 years of nighttime blood sugar tests and I’m pretty adept at flipping around the obstacles in my house within the shadows of my children’s dreams.

 Sure, I’ve had my fair share of Lego mishaps.

 Action figures have tried to impale the soles of my feet.

 And I’ve slipped on a Pokemon card or two back in the day.

But lately my boys have grown out of such things.  The Nerf gun bullets that are around are a friendly foe and dirty clothes strewn on the floor are more than anything, a cake walk.

It was last night I faced an unexpected enemy.

I was in the 16 year old's room checking his blood sugar.  He was 102, which brought a stupor of thought and caused the creaky tired wheels in my brain to turn at fever pitch.  Temp basal I wondered?  Food?  He can drop almost a hundred points at night on a PE day.  What is my best course of action?

As my brain calculated and drew graphs of possible outcomes, I made my first and biggest mistake…I got up off the bed and started to walk with no thought to my surroundings.

That’s when the backpack sucker punched me in the shin and I began to fall.

My trajectory put me right into the glass closet door, so I shifted my weight adeptly, midair, and began careening towards the laundry basket instead.

Ok.  Let’s take a knee here and huddle up to discuss my options.

1) Obviously, letting my face take the brunt of the impact wasn’t practical.  It’s finally free of that zit that has persisted for the past month, I didn’t want to ruin that.

2) My body wasn’t long enough to make catching myself on the wall before landing an option.  I’m a ninja, not an amazon.

3) My sister in law told me the best way to fall is not to catch yourself with your hands, because wrists are weak and would take the brunt of the impact.  Her advice has always been to relax and roll with it.  She’s a teacher, she knows such things.

Ok huddle over.  Here is what I decided to do.

I fell on my knee, catching myself directly on my wrist while trying to eject my hand away from the floor.

The result.

Catastrophe.

My 16 year old was lucid enough to jump out of bed and help me up off the floor.  I was more horrified at the possible half-inch of butt crack showing than the fall itself.

I went to bed with my tail between my legs, defeated.

I’m sure there is a moral, or some kind of lesson easily glean-able from my actions.  But since I feel like I’ve woken up after a serious car wreck, and my brain has in fact, turned to Jello…I’m going to leave most the gleaning to you.

Although I will leave you with this:

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” ~Confucious