Threat Assessment Machine

Sometime I wish I had the heads up display of The Terminator. Not only for the ability to access vehicle information at a glance, but so I can track and assess the threat level surrounding the newbdaughter.

Having a fairly mobile and exploratory one year old is an exercise in constantly monitoring what she’s doing, where she’s doing it and – here’s the paradigm shift from early baby – where she’s going next.

When she sat happily on the floor, I could control what was within her reach. I knew that whatever she grabbed was staying there and if I moved it, she wasn’t going to go after it. Even when she was crawling, there was a height limit to what she could explore.

Now that she’s standing, that height limit still exists  (if a little higher), but she is almost able to reach over table height and grab whatever catches her eye.  Even that is not the biggest threat to her safety right now. Gravity is.

We adults take for granted how gravity works. We know that the world is full of edges beyond which gravity will pull us. A six inch high curb, to us, represents a very short downward distance.  To my thirty inch high daughter, it represents twenty percent of her body height. You or I could easily catch ourselves if we stumbled over an eighteen inch step, but one-year-olds have no idea how to reverse the effects of gravity. Which means they fall.

A lot.

So when I’m with my daughter, I’m always on the look out for the next thing she’ll fall from, on or into and I’m making sure her landing area is free from harm. For those times she decides to just sit down on nothing but air, I catch her. Every potential fall is identified as either acceptable or in need of intervention.  This means calculating all the possible vectors she could follow as she plunges down every time she moves and then positioning myself to best affect a rescue. I do all of this while trying to maintain an outward appearance of calm reassurance as she looks back from the bottom of my spiral staircase, as if to ask “Can I do this, Daddy?”

Of course you can, darling girl. I’m going to encourage you to explore and I’m going to let you take some falls, but not the ones that will get you really hurt. And hopefully you’ll feel safe enough to make your own way but not so looked after that you feel stifled in your journey.

This is never going to end, is it?

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