Terrible mother...

My husband makes me feel like a terrible mother and maybe he is right. My son gets bumps and bruises and falls down all the time when I am watching him. When my husband is home with him, he rarely gets hurt. Don't get me wrong, my son is not getting injured but I let him explore and work things out on his own. When he first learned to crawl, I didn't restrict him. Of course I blocked stairways and closed rooms that are not quite baby proofed. When he started to stand up, I didn't restrict him. He would crawl to a baby gate or to a wall and stand up. He was still pretty wobbly so he would lose his balance and sometimes bump his little head. I was never far but I also didn't hold him up. I wanted him to learn how to stand up and learn how to keep balance.

In the front of my house there is a little step leading to the front door. He went down that step so many times face first. I was right there with him but I let him learn it for himself. One time he fell, not too hard, on his ear. His ear was red afterward and he cried hard. After a minute or so, he was fine and distracted by something else. But my husband thinks that I am terrible for letting him fall. I feel like he learned how to get down that stair and does it so easily and without effort now so that I am not constantly worried that he will crawl over there and really hurt himself. He loves to stand and look out the front door so I hated to block it off. Now he is a pro getting down that step and if I did it for him he wouldn't have learned to do it on his own.

Yesterday we were playing on the floor. I was laying on my back and he was crawling all over me. I pretended like I was coming after him and he would crawl away as fast as he could and look over his shoulder to see if I was hot on his trail. But I would just lay back down and he would hurry back to me to try to get me to come after him. We did this for a while and one time he scooted away and went to the baby gate. He stood up and looked back at me. I pretended to be asleep so he would come back and attack me. Then I heard him shriek and heard the rattle of the baby gate. I jumped up and he was crying hard. He little hand was still holding the gate as he sat on the floor with big tears rolling down his face. I thought he caught his finger or something so I grabbed him and hugged him as I tried to look at his hands. They seemed ok and I was able to calm him down pretty quickly. It was almost bedtime so I sat with him and rocked him a little. I gave him his bedtime bottle and he was back to his normal self. Then I noticed a huge bump by his eye. Apparently he didn't hurt his hand but had bumped his eye. I couldn't figure out what he could have hit his head on but it was probably the wall or something. I put a little ice on it but it didn't seem to be bothering him. My husband got home late and I told him about it. The baby was already asleep so he couldn't see it. He was so mad at me that I let it happen. I argued that it was a freak thing. I can't put him in his pack-n-play all day long and I don't want to hold him back from developing. Bumps and brusies are a part of this age. But then I doubted myself and felt like I should have been able to prevent it. We were playing and I didn't see what happened. I shouldn't have been pretending to sleep. When we woke up this morning, the bump was gone and you couldn't even tell that something had happened. Now I am going to be more cautious and try not to hamper his growth and development.