The much ballyhooed state of childhood just wouldn’t be complete without a few really good shiners, now would it? Maggie was getting off of the trampoline the other day, and I’m not entirely certain how she accomplished it, but she nailed her eye on something and ruptured a blood vessel.

I’m a pretty laid back mother, particularly in the bumps and bruises department, but if you had seen the extra eyeball bulging from her eyelid, like a pulsating red marble, and expanding by the second, you would not fault me a bit for calling Chris at work and demanding that he COME HOME NOW. Seriously, I was that unnerved. I thought we’d be going to the emergency room to lance the sucker before it popped or put so much pressure on the ocular nerve that my baby would be blinded for life.

While waiting for Chris to drive the five blocks home, I pinned Maggie down and applied a bag of frozen corn to her face. Why frozen corn? Because I was out of frozen peas. Duh. Don’t you heal wounds with vegetables? This resulted in huge amounts of screaming on Maggie’s end (can’t blame her, that third eyeball looked painful). Thankfully, in the ten minutes it took for Chris to arrive the injury had settled down and morphed from a third eye to a mass of swelling so huge she could barely open her eye.

I had been sitting there alternately freezing her face and holding up one finger, demanding that she follow it with her eyes (they followed) and tilting her to put her face in the sun to check her pupils for reactivity (they reacted). Chris arrived, assessed Maggie, and we debated taking her in, but decided that we’d just watch her closely and try to keep icing the injury. Maggie rallied quickly, wanting to get back into her usual routine of play, Dora, and being read to, only stopping occasionally to announce that her boo-boo eye hurt. Considering that she couldn’t open it all the way for two days after the fact, I wasn’t surprised.

Maggie is the kind of little girl who should have a set of fairy wings permanently pinned to her back, the way she flits about, charming and indulging in general dottiness, so the huge black eye is really out of place. She wore her big princess dress to church on Sunday. By then, the shiner had spread from the top of her eye to create a matching pool of purple underneath. She is perfectly content to have the world stare and gasp, loving the attention she is getting, and I just laugh.

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