Okay, so I admit it. I allowed my child to get slightly broken.

The good news is she'll be fine.


It was 37 degrees Celsius. The dead were complaining. The air was still and heavy and wet. The grass was yellow. Nobody wanted to do nothing no how. We spent the day reclining in front of a battery of fans, Scarlet spraying our glistening bodies with water every few moments.

At sun down Scarlet and Littlestar went to work. Mademoiselle J. fed Little Miss Popsicle dinner while I locked myself away in my sweltering laboratorium to finish off a writing assignment with a looming deadline, delayed by the blackouts and Internet outages that have plagued our village over the last few days.

We took Popsicle up to bed together. I told Popsicle a story about her and her teddybear Bo flying around with teams of robins on their arms, and then Mlle. J. read a chapter from Luc et Martine vont a l'ecole with crisp Swiss diction. "I lush you Papa," said Popsicle.

I fell back into my work.

I didn't think about her again until I hear the loud thump! from upstairs. Mlle. J. and I looked at one another across the Great Room, and then I bolted out of my chair and ran upstairs.

Popsicle was sitting on the floor, beneath the mouth of her loft. She yawned and blinked, slowly waking up. And then she started to sniffle pitiably. "Popsicle!" I cried. "Did you fall out of your room?"

"I don't know," she said, and then started wailing.

I picked her up and rushed into the bathroom, slapping on the bright overhead light and jumping up onto the counter. We brought her over to the large mirror and examined her all over. "Do you have ouchies?" I asked.

"No," she said.

"Were you sleeping?" I asked.

"Yeah," she confirmed.

She had a small bark on her eyebrow, and an angry red rug-burn on the bicep on the same side. I carried her around the washroom and continued my investigation while singing her songs and asking her more questions. It seemed that she had been totally asleep, and had wormed herself across the floor as she tossed and turned in the heat, finally pushing out too far until gravity took over. She had obviously flipped in mid-air and taken the better part of the impact on her diapered bum. "Does your bum hurt?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said.

"Does anything else hurt?"

"No."

We went downstairs and she sat on the counter and chatted with Mlle. J. while I prepared a fresh bottle of milk. Popsicle giggled and played, pouting a little when I told her it was time to go back upstairs. When she was crawling across her bed she yelled out, "My hand! My hand!"

"Do you have an ouchie in your hand?" I asked when she lay down, manipulating it gently.

"Yeah," she said.

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

I told her a story about the importance of sleeping in beds rather than on the floor, and then sang her songs until she fell asleep. I then had a rotten night of sleep as I woke up every few hours to check on the child, watching for symptoms of concussion or any other kind of distress. In between these examinations I had a series of truly engaging dreams in which my child was dying...

This morning her wrist was slightly swollen, so we applied an ice compress. "Just a little ouchie," Popsicle told Littlestar seriously. "It's my hand."

"Yes, I know it's your hand, darling."

"I fell down out of my room."

"I know, Papa told me."

To make a long story short: the swelling did not go down. The child was X-rayed at Sunnybrook, and it was discovered that she has chipped the bone of her wrist. The last telephone update from the city reported that she will have to wear a cast for a few weeks to immobilize it.

That's right. My toddler will have a cast. It's like wearing a sandwich board that says My parents don't love me enough to keep me safe.

If you've read my Trimester Reports you may recall that several busybodies have made quite a stink over the safety of having a toddler sleeping in a loft, and I suppose they will now feel vindicated. Of course, the issue in question was whether or not to put railings on the ladder to the loft -- there was never any discussion of the child rolling across the floor in her sleep and falling out -- but I'm sure this kind of minor detail will be overlooked in favour of the greater gloating.

I am now going to proceed to get very drunk. Ta-ta!