When she tried it earlier this afternoon after convincing her Papa to bring her up to the bedroom, I put a quick stop to it and removed her from the king-sized bed (which must have seemed positively gargantuan to little Abigail), opting to distract elsewhere her rather than fight a losing battle on her equivalent of an irresistible giant trampoline.
However, she found her way back upstairs later in the day, with her father in tow, and tried again. This time, despite her father's warnings, she continued on for long enough to fall off and hit the wall with her cheek on the way down.
The injury was superficial, though I'm sure it smarted quite a bit, and a some amount of TLC was required to stem the flow of tears afterwards. I heard about the incident after the fact, when Abby came down with a damp, slightly marked cheek that I was sure would turn into a big bruise, as the redness increased over a period of about twenty minutes or so.
I took this picture right after it happened, and it is barely visible (on her left cheek), partly because her whole face is a bit washed-out in the light of the flash, and partly because it wasn't showing up as well at that point as it was several minutes later, when the last of the pictures were taken.
However, though I spent quite a bit of time fretting about it, it was soon but a memory to Abigail. After all, there were family friends to chat with, second cousins to play with, books to read...
... and early Christmas presents to open.
We had to do a bit of coaxing to get Abby started tearing off the paper, including regaling her with stories of the presents that she received on her birthday and reminding her of how well she unwrapped them, but she quickly got the hang of the process.
The mark on her cheek is starting to show up more in this picture.
The present? A peek-a-boo bear!
She was initially a little too distracted to really appreciate it, but the bear proved to be useful in staving off a tantrum just before dinnertime, when Abby became insistent upon hanging out with Nana while Nana was otherwise engaged in meal preparation.
So, while the adults marveled at her gift and passed it around, she picked up a book, found a comfy chair, and curled up in front of the tree.
And that was how the mark on her cheek ended up looking, at its worst. Soon after, it began to fade, and had disappeared entirely by bedtime.
Let's hope that the lesson she learned didn't disappear with it.
