It runs in the family on his mom's side

Monday morning I'm laying in bed talking on the phone at 7:30 AM and in the half-light coming through the blackout curtains I see a half full .75 liter bottle of water falling towards my left eye. Evidently, I had nudged the bottle when I was picking up the phone and 10 min later it decided to fall on me. It nailed me right in the eyeball. Arnica, Hypericum and Ledum; the black eye cocktail. I managed to not look like a prize fighter and by the next morning my vision was no longer blurry out of that eye.

Don't even ask me how many times in a week I run into the kitchen table with my thigh! And no, my vision is fine - I just got it checked 2 months ago and it's 20/25.

In 7th grade I was walking down the hall in Jr High and one of my 'friends' came running down the hall with a block of wood from shop class. He hit me on the top of the head with it as if playing a game of Duck, Duck, Goose and I was Goose. It landed me in the Nurse's office for the rest of the day with a mild concussion. Did you know that most schools don't even have a nurse on staff all day 5 days a week anymore?

In 3rd grade I got my fingers closed in the wrong side of a classroom door. I got a metal finger splint from the doctor for that one which got reused several times over the years.

In 7th grade I was running the 100 yard dash one day in PE and at the finish line I tripped on the toe of my own shoe and skidded along the blacktop for a few feet. That was not one of my most graceful moves.

At 3 years old I was carrying a sandwich on a plate, tripped while walking down a flight of 3 stairs in my own house, cut my forehead open and got several stitches.

Just before I turned 5 I was riding my tricycle in our carport and came up behind my about-to-be 6 yr old brother who was shoveling snow. My upper lip contacted with the shovel as he threw the snow over his shoulder. A snowy ride to the local military hospital for that one. A week later that same brother got his head stuck between the banisters on the upper staircase in the house.

No one was harmed, but one day in sixth grade (elementary school) we were playing kickball at lunch recess and when I kicked the ball my platform Mary Jane went flying through the air. It actually went further than the ball did. The perils of wearing hand-me-down shoes that don't quite fit yet.

I'm not even going to go over my brainless bike accident when I was in 5th grade, other than to say "big steep hill", "downhill with no hands", "swimsuit, shorts & flip-flops". You can imagine the rest.

Then there was the time that I went dirt bike riding with Joe and ended up with a gravel-sized hole in my jeans and knee.

And the 10 stitches over my left eye from playing catcher in the local co-ed softball league when I was 30. The pitcher was having and off day and one of the pitches bounced off of the plate into my eye socket. "No, it's fine, I can keep playing!" "Uh, Natalie, it's bleeding. A lot. I think you should go to the hospital" "Fine, but I'll be back for the end of the game." NOT! But I was back 3 games later, this time with a catcher's mask! Yeah, we didn't wear masks before then, but two other catchers got hit over the next week after I did so they became standard equipment for the league. That was before I knew about Arnica so I had one of the nastiest, coolest, grossest shiners ever seen. Joe couldn't go out in public with me since most people assumed that I had been beaten up by him. Fortunately I had both neighbors and co-workers on the softball team that had seen the accident happen so they knew the real story and kept the false stories from spreading.

To think that I had 3 years of ballet. Come to think about it, it could have been worse if I hadn't taken ballet.