This has not really been our week. I've left more messages for the advice nurses at our pediatrician's office in the past seven days than in Nora's entire previous life, and nearly doubled our number of in-person visits. It turned out nothing was seriously wrong—at least, nothing we couldn't have prevented—but there was a lot of being-on-the-safe-side, much of it motivated by parental guilt.

The reason behind the to-ing and fro-ing, my exhaustion and shaky emotionalism, is simply that Nora fell. Twice. The first time, my husband was watching her as she sat in the bed, but she wiggled quickly over the pillows that were supposed to be containing her and did a neat, thwacking dive onto the hardwood floor. I heard it from the kitchen: a loud smack, the briefest of pauses, and a louder wail. Nursing quickly soothed her, and we could see no bumps or emergent bruises, so we went on with our day. The next morning, though, her nose was runny, and I remembered something a friend had told me, when her little boy fell down an entire flight of stairs, about the nurse cautioning her to watch for cerebrospinal fluid leaking from the nose.

The mere thought quickly drove me to Dr. Google, where I learned on a site that looked kind of respectable—you know, science-y—that you can test nasal leaks for the presence of cerebrospinal fluid by smearing the suspect liquid on a brown paper bag. It will either dry shiny, like a snail track (snot) or clear, giving the bag a dull appearance (cerebrospinal fluid). We had the raw materials for this highly scientific test on hand—indeed, we have dozens of folded-up paper bags jammed next to the washing machine, and gooey liquid from the baby's nose was also freely available. A mere five minutes after concluding my online researches I was holding up a snotty paper bag to the light and asking my husband if it looked shiny to him. (Romance, clearly, is not dead in our home.) We both thought it looked like a snail track, but I called the advice line anyway, just to ask.

It turned out that Nora was just getting a cold, her very first one, so we shifted into a routine of humidifier-running and saline-spraying and bulb-suctioning of the goopy, stuffy nostrils. It has been her first cold, and though it's a mild one it's been no fun; since it's now March, I had hoped we were going to get through the winter without colds. We found ourselves perfecting a technique for putting her in an infantine half-nelson in order to do the saline/suction routine, which she hates worse than pretty much anything. Strangely, she was perfectly content having her temperature taken, which seems to me a much more invasive and undignified procedure. It was a slight fever that led to the first pediatrician visit of the week; they needed to check for signs of ear infection, which were mercifully absent.

Throughout all this, my husband was troubled by obvious pangs of guilt about the fall. I tried to reassure him by saying that it could have happened to either of us; she could have flipped off the changing table sometime when I oh-so-briefly reached for her pajamas, or taken a tumble in innumerable other ways. I really did mean it. But deep down I had just the shadow of a thought that maybe I was immune, maybe I was just that little bit more careful because of some secret mother serum, maybe something that was in my IV at the hospital.

Yeah. Right. I got my comeuppance: or, rather, Nora got my comeuppance, right in the face. Every so often, I get a bad night of insomnia, and on a day this past week when I was overtired but worried about work and a zillion other things, my hamster-on-the-wheel brain kept me awake. The next day, tired and distracted, I gave Nora her lunch and snapped the tray off her booster seat. I must have also absentmindedly unbuckled the seat harness before I stepped away to rinse the cereal-covered tray, because the next thing I knew there was a hugely loud smack, horribly loud, and Nora was sprawled on the kitchen floor below her seat, face to the floor, screaming piteously.

My normally happy, equable little girl was inconsolable for nearly half an hour. A bruise was already emerging on her chubby little cheek, and it looked like it hurt her to nurse. I was crying almost as hard as she was, but as soon as she was quiet enough that I could actually leave an audible message for the advice nurse, I called. They called back within five minutes and asked how fast I could be there; the doctor had an opening in twenty minutes and wanted to make sure the cheekbone wasn't broken. When I stopped freaking out about that possibility, I wondered what they must think; I had called about a fall just a few days before. Would they suspect me of being a child abuser? An attention-seeker? Or, more benignly, just the world's most careless mother?

Our first doctor visit of the week had been Monday; now it was Wednesday and we were on our way back. The cheekbone wasn't broken, and the doctor felt all was well but said to wake Nora up every two hours that night, as a precaution. She was kind and reassuring enough that on my way out I was able to joke that I hoped we wouldn't be back on Friday.

As it turned out, we weren't back on Friday; we were back on Thursday. When I came in toting Nora (still in her jammies at 4 pm; after that every-two-hours wakeup schedule, I never quite got going for the day), the receptionist looked at us and said, "Oh, no! Back again?" Yep, we were, thanks to a couple of little nosebleeds that were worrisome in conjunction with the fall. Eventually, after some poking and prodding—and commenting that Nora's bruised cheek looked nowhere near as bad as she would have thought—the pediatrician pronounced her fine. The nosebleed was probably from the still-present cold and sniffles, in particular the suctioning. (I didn't mention the half-nelson.)

When Nora was very tiny, we used to buckle her into her carseat carrier to take her up and down our very steep, narrow stairs. Now she seems so robust and healthy that we've grown too cavalier about her safety. I still can't quite believe we let her fall twice in the space of a week ("Now we're even," as my husband said), but it's a good reminder—one that comes just in time for the serious round of babyproofing that we need to do sooner rather than later, since she looks to be on the verge of starting to crawl. I thought I was prepared for the fact that babyhood and childhood would inevitably come with a lot of bumps and bruises. I knew that I couldn't keep Nora safe from everything, but I didn't think that one of the things she needed to be kept safe from was actually me. I guess that's parenting; you start out hypervigilant and with high ideals, and you end up messing up more often than you want to. Maybe none of us, however well intentioned, can help inadvertently causing our kids some kind of pain, whether psychological or physical. We can only hope that the bruises don't end up as bad as they seem at first.