Hippity Hop

Our daughter, Johannah (The Artsy One), was always full of adventure.  A happy little kid with no sense at all of her own mortality.

When we first moved to Connecticut, we overbought our house.  We had moved from California and bought up accordingly, not fully realizing how expensive life in Connecticut would be.  We basically got taxed out of it.  But, for the first five years here, we lived in a house with high ceilings, a very tall foyer, and tall staircase.  This becomes important.

I think Johannah had gotten the hippity hop ball for her birthday. The kind with a handle; you sit on it and bounce around. She was about four years old and had been bouncing around the house all evening.  But now it was bedtime.

She brought the hippity hop ball upstairs, and it had always stayed downstairs.  There were bells going off in my head, but I couldn’t quite place what the problem was.  She was hopping up and down the hallway, very safely and contentedly, and we were busy getting the bath ready and pulling out jammies.

Next thing I know, she is hopping toward the top of the stairs.  The whole disaster of the scene was flashing through my brain, but I didn’t even have time to yell; it all happened so fast.

Johannah goes bounding off the top step of the stairs.  I swear to you, it was like an Olympic sport. Like ski jumping. She had height. She had grace. She had style. That was the initial bound. She hit the stairs with the next bounce and that’s were it all went wrong.

I can still see her coming off the hippity hop and flying in an uncontrolled manner. There was no grace, no style. This was no Olympic feat.  There would be no placards held up with “10” written on them. Thank goodness there was a 90° turn in the stairs.  She literally goes splat against the wall and slides/falls to the floor onto the landing, a lot like Bugs Bunny when the Road Runner gets him. The bouncy ball goes flying and bounces the rest of the way down. 

Had she gone all the way down the stairs, it could have been very bad. But thankfully, she did not and she was not hurt. But boy was she mad. She did not like being unexpectedly smashed against the wall. I think the tears were ones of outrage, not of pain.

And that was when we made the iron-clad rule that the hippity hop ball stays downstairs.