I’ve always been a pretty clumsy person. I’ve run into, tripped over, and fallen on more things than I can count in my twenty-four years. In fact, my earliest memory is of the time that I broke my left foot. I was about two years old and I was pretending that I was in the Olympics. I stood on top of a box and jumped, intending to land on one foot, but I did not come out the victor; I hit the floor with one foot just fine, except for the fact that I broke it and had to be rushed to the hospital that night.

I wore that cast proudly.

As a mom, I have always thought it would be really cool if my daughter took after me in some way, but this was not exactly what I meant.

Yesterday, we got home around 9pm from running an errand and Boo wanted to climb up the stairs on the outside of our apartment building and back down the single set of stairs inside that leads to the ground floor, where our apartment is located. She has done this a million times before. I stood off to the side, watching her slowly make her way down the steps backwards, as she usually does, and when she got to the last step, she stood and turned. When she did, her foot caught on something (I presume her other foot) and she fell forward, crashing down onto the ground.

I panicked.

My poor baby was hysterical. I picked her up and held her for a minute, but that didn’t seem to do any good. I walked down the hall to our apartment, sat down on the living room floor with her, and attempted to calm her down, to no avail. She hadn’t calmed down a bit and I knew immediately that something was wrong. I began touching her foot gently, moving it around a bit, and she screamed at me. She broke her foot. I knew it, I just knew it.

I quickly stood up and packed us both back into the car and headed to the nearest emergency room. They took X-rays and I tried to keep her calm, which worked until she tried to stand on her foot again and realized how badly it hurt, then fell right back down. It was also way past her bedtime and being exhausted didn’t help matters whatsoever.

On the bright side, the X-ray showed no signs of any fractures, so they concluded that she severely sprained her ankle – a week and a half before our vacation, no less! That seems to be our luck. I’m glad she’s okay, though. That is not an experience I would like to relive anytime soon… or ever.