On Sunday morning we decided that we would have a little ceremony to inaugurate our new house in Newton. So Sarah and I invited our parents over for a tour of the empty home. We bought some orange juice without pulp so that we could make mimosas. Venkat had given me a basic picture of the ritual in an Indian household on Friday. They put milk onto a burner and cook it until it boils over spilling over the stove. Then you put rice into the milk and make rice pudding. Our plan seemed simpler but lacked the tradition of a milk worshipping culture. Venkat also mentioned that when coming to the US that people are given instructions on names that wouldn’t culturally work well despite being very popular in India. The one he pointed out in particular was Gopi.

Jeremy has been having nightmares lately. He told me one of his nightmares was that bugs were eating his feet. Maybe it’s the season but I had nightmares on Saturday night as well. The first nightmare I was in Vegas at a key conference for my business. While doing a printout through the computer I somehow accidentally requested that all of the money in my life savings accounts be liquidated as cash to be output in another room as $100 bills. I then was running around for the rest of the nightmare trying to get the money back where it belonged. I probably would never have remembered the dream but later in the dream I had Madeline in a backpack and she fell out of the backpack backwards onto the ground from the height of where I was standing onto a hard marble floor. In the dream she instantly died when she hit the floor. It was too much to sleep through so I woke-up. It’s not tough to analyze that with buying a home, having a start-up in the middle of lots of negotiations, and having a child under 2 years old – I have some natural anxiety about money and safety. The cats that keep me up at night don’t even have to work that hard.

Sarah and I arrived about a half hour early for the ceremony at the house on Sunday morning and I was still a bit freaked out from the nightmares. To keep Madeline occupied I went outside to swing her on the playground. She likes to order who goes on which color swing, with her on the red one and me on the yellow one swinging at the same time. I hadn’t thought she would be able to use the swings but we had lightly tested her on a set while returning from Bar Harbor and she was able to hold the chains. On Saturday night we had gone to the Park by Zaftigs, which now has a totally new mural, and she had swung on those. The child next to us was about a year older and kept asking her mother to swing her “super high” and Madeline was interested in going to such a height but I kept her at a reasonable safe height and counseled her that the “super high” height was for older kids. So I was swinging her on Sunday morning on a beautiful cool summer day and she wasn’t too high but for some reason she let go of the chains while on an upswing and fell backwards onto her back landing with her back flat on the hard backyard ground faster than I could think to catch her.

Madeline was shocked and hurt so she wanted Sarah for comfort. The fall looked innocuous since she fell with a uniform distribution on her back and only from the height of the smallest swing, about a foot. But she was upset for about an hour as both sets of parents arrived for the event. Sarah was rocking with her and we all were concerned that she might pass out with a concussion or head injury so when she got tired and started to close her eyes Sarah kept her awake. We gave up on the mimosas and as Madeline settled into more normal behavior we drove the half-mile to the Atrium for a Cheesecake Factory brunch.

After brunch we went up to the play space and we couldn’t help but note the very cushy foam floor that was installed there. It squashes under your feet like you are walking on a piece of hard memory foam bedding. The idea is that the mall doesn’t want any falls by the kids climbing around on their play equipment. I got a recommendation that I’ll be following-up on shortly to install rubber mulch under the swing-set both for Madeline’s safety and any other kids who might want to play on the swings. It cushions falls up to 9 feet. They sell it by the pallet for $500 per pallet at Home Depot. We may also buy a swing with a back to it for her and a baby swing for her sibling we are expecting in January. After reading the book on medical errors, Internal Bleeding, I and other parents need to take the fall by Madeline as a warning sign and fix things before it happens again. Other folks could also consider this event as a reason to put safety mulch under their backyard swings and take other precautions.

I’m looking forwards to an end to nightmares but I’ll need to be more vigilant when I am awake. The nightmares give me practice drills for things I need to be careful of. Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual about this stuff.