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This post is not about pro­gram­ming — so skip it if you want. It’s about this week­end — or more par­tic­u­larly, about one of the — if not the most fright­en­ing moments of my adult life.

As any­one who reads my stuff knows — I have a beau­ti­ful almost four month old baby girl named Abi­gail. Since she’s come into this world, I’ve found my hear grow a mil­lion times the size of what it was before, I’ve re-evaluated so much in my life — sim­ply put, my life sim­ply isn’t the same.

And I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

On sat­ur­day, as I was com­ing down the stairs from chang­ing yet another atom-bomb of a dia­per, one of our three cats was asleep on the stairs and I didn’t see her. I stepped on the cat and imme­di­ately lost my bal­ance — and my grip on Abby. Abby fell about four or five feet to the hard­wood floor below me. She landed on her back/shoulders and head. Luck­ily, she started cry­ing the exact sec­ond she hit her head and I picked her up within mil­lisec­onds it seems.

She was crying/moving/kicking — which up until I heard her cry this was the most fright­en­ing moment. The sec­ond she started cry­ing, it was the best moment in my life. I wouldn’t let her go — I just gripped her as tight as I could as she cried and my wife dialed 911.

Well, after 24 hours in infant ICU and her first MRI, Cat-Scan and X-Rays, we finally got to bring her back home on Sun­day late-afternoon. It’s funny — once every­thing calmed down in the hos­pi­tal, she was already act­ing if noth­ing had hap­pened, she was kick­ing and smil­ing and charm­ing every­one in the unit. See­ing her strapped to a board, with a small infant-size neck brace around her neck — tubes and IVs and mon­i­tors all stuck in/on her was awful, but she smiled and kicked through it all (with a healthy dose of cry­ing, but that’s cause no one would let her eat).

At the end of it all — she got out of this with a small skull frac­ture, which should be noth­ing to worry about and a bump on the nog­gin. Her and Daddy now share some­thing — head trauma. She’s back to her old self, but I can hon­estly say I am not — I’m still ner­vous and overly care­ful. We’ve banned the feline occu­pants from the stair­case and we’ve stayed home an extra day (per doc­tors orders) to spend more time with Abby.

Every­one kept telling me how these things hap­pen — and that babies and chil­dren are resilient things. Think­ing about it — I know they’re right, given what I put my par­ents through and the num­ber of ER vis­its we had to make when I was grow­ing up.

Becom­ing a Dad — and now hav­ing her first real hurt come from my actions — really changes the way you see the world and how you mea­sure what’s impor­tant in life. Don’t let any­one ever tell you different.

This post is not about pro­gram­ming — so skip it if you want. It’s about this week­end — or more par­tic­u­larly, about one of the — if not the most...