Today started out like a normal morning. Cordy was walking up and down the stairs, pulling every known toy from her room to clutter up the downstairs. Mira was on my lap in the living room, Aaron was on the couch.

I heard Cordy at the top of the stairs, knowing she was getting ready to come back down again. And then I heard the thump. The first of many. And a squeaky screech after the first thump.

The stairs. She’s falling. Oh God, she’s falling.

Aaron and I locked eyes very briefly and we both jumped up. I quickly set Mira back down in the chair and turned to the stairs, just in time to see Cordy tumbling down the last five or six steps. Tumbling head over heels, then barrel rolling, limbs tangled in each other, her little body finally hit bottom with a dull thud. That single second it took us to get to her felt like an eternity, as she didn’t make any noise in that moment.

Aaron immediately swept her up in his arms, asking, “Cordy, are you OK?” Finally, after what seemed like forever, she cried. Cries of fear more than cries of pain. She continued to cry hard for a few minutes, then switched from daddy’s arms to mommy’s arms.

I continued to ask her if she was OK, and then she said, in such a tiny voice, “Rocket…” I looked up the staircase to see her Rocket toy (from Little Einsteins) about 2/3 of the way up. Aaron retrieved Rocket for her, and she hugged the hard plastic toy tight. A little more time passed, and she stopped crying. Clearly still stunned, but she showed no signs of injury. At that point she tried to push her luck, “Cake? Ice cream?” We laughed a little at that point, realizing she was OK.

I’ve never been so scared in my life. In that one brief moment, hearing her hit each step on the way down, seeing those last few tumbles, I worried I had lost my Cordy, less than a week before her third birthday. Holding her tight at the bottom of the stairs, I couldn’t help but cry. I was shaking uncontrollably. My hands moved all over her, checking for any bumps, running my hands through her mass of curls and wiping away her tears.

She’s fine. Even though she fell down 13 stairs, she doesn’t show any signs of the fall. I don’t know if she’s been paying attention to her daddy’s stage combat falls and rolls training, or if she just got lucky. I can’t begin to say how thankful I am that she wasn’t hurt. We had no reason to suspect that this would happen. Cordy has been going up and down those stairs for months. We’ve gone over stair safety over and over. Sometimes I can hear her chanting our manta as she walks down the stairs: “slow….careful…” She knows to hold the rail.

I don’t know what went wrong today. Maybe she forgot the rules for just a moment. But a moment is all it takes. It’s amazing how fragile life seems in those moments. I hope it never happens again, and we’ll be revisiting the topic of stair safety, too. Because I never want to feel that sickening, frightening, heart-in-my-throat feeling again.