How to take 15 years off your life in 10 easy steps

1. Spend every minute of every day telling your child to stop climbing on the furniture and cabinets. Your child will ignore you, but as a parent, you must continue this message ad nauseum. (Life lost: .5 years)
2. Repeat every day for months. (Life lost: .5 years)
3. Since your child is ignoring you, he will then climb onto the highest perch he can find in your house. In some cases, this may be book shelves, curio cabinets, bunk beds, cabinets; perhaps he will swing from the shower curtain rod. Regardless, the height of the child's climb must be no less than twice his own height. Additionally, the landing surface beneath him must not be cushioned in any way. (Life lost: .5 years)
4. Child must complete step 3 while you are momentarily talking with your spouse about your other child who has probably done something heinous that day. The possibilities for the other child's misbehaviour include, but are not limited to: cheating on a test, failing a test after not studying, bullying a classmate, beating up on a classmate, kissing a girl, failing to wear his school uniform, failing to clean his room. (Life lost: 1.2 years)
5. Child's dangerous climb must be attempted during doctors' non-working hours. This includes, but is not limited to: after bedtime when he was supposed to be sleeping anyway, weekends, early morning, evenings, holidays, three day weekends. Alternately, child may attempt climb during flu season, chicken pox epidemic, lethal Chinese goat pox pandemic, or some other time when every patient in the physician's office is a snotty, contagious petri dish of disgusting. (Life lost: 3.2 years)
6. Child will land on his or her most vital organs and either bleed profusely, not bleed at all (even more alarming), lose consciousness, become disoriented and confused, vomit, have entrails violently explode out of his abdomen, or in some other way scare you to death. You, however, must not reveal your panic at seeing your child's interior, but rather remain calm and get him/her to stop crying so that the blood stops squirting out like the Trevi Fountain. (Life lost: 3.2 years)
7. You will escort your child to the nearest emergency room, where the wait will be horrific. Every surface you see will be crawling with bacteria, virus, or something worse. Elderly people in wheelchairs will have drool and snot the color of Shrek running down their faces. They will be sputtering and coughing and hacking while making feeble attempts to raise their veiny, blue, emaciated little T-Rex arms to cover their toothless mouths. Infants and toddlers with wildly inappropriate haircuts and clothing will be screaming and puking or running around, eating old Cheerios off the floor while their siblings scream and puke. (Life lost: 2.2 years)
8. You will wait while CBS's entire prime time programming runs through. Clearly, you will realize why you never watch Katie Couric do the news, and why the local newscasters are small-market failures. Eventually, your name will be shouted, mispronounced, and repeated through the halls of the hospital so that you may fill out reams of paperwork, have your child's vital signs assessed (good thing he wasn't really dying), fork over your exorbitant copay, and return to the waiting area where your seat has been usurped by a morbidly obese mullet wearing a sweatshirt with a dwarf on it that aptly says, "DOPEY." Upon seeing mullet and her daughter flush with what must surely be leprosy, you decide to stand and wait the remaining hour on your feet. Your child, of course, is trying to go to sleep. It is now bedtime, however, you are convinced he has a concussion, and periodically shake/pinch/soak his face in cold water to keep him awake. An hour later, a nurse will again mispronounce your name loudly through the now-even-more-crowded-than-before waiting room, and you will triumphantly proceed through the mass of dying humanity to a waiting bed... (Life lost 1.6 years)
9. ...Where you will wait for another hour. The storybook you have re-read six times will have lost its appeal, and you will find yourself explaining hepatitis for fifteen minutes to your preschooler because he asked about the sharps disposal unit and hell, you have nothing better to do. Now that you are officially inside the fortress of the ER, you realize that while the stinky and fetid were outside in the waiting room, the truly diseased were behind those double doors. Moaning from the bed adjacent to you will tempt you to peek behind the curtain, however, you must resist this at all costs. What you see will not be un-see-able, and you will forever have the vision of an obese diabetic with open leg and foot ulcers, struggling to breathe under an oxygen mask, with matted hair and nasty clothes, and you will be thankful that you are only here because your child has a death wish, and not because you/he/any one you truly love is very ill. (Life lost: 1.0 years)
10. The moment you have been waiting for...the doctor arrives! You accurately (you don't want the doctor to think you were neglectful), but casually (no one wants to be an overly alarmist/worry wart/helicopter parent) explain your situation, fully expecting to be told everything is fine. Instead, you will be told that your child requires a CT Scan, has a concussion, possibly a broken nose, and that his sinus is filled with blood such that it is impossible to see if the bone behind the sinus cavity has fractured, though it might have and thus, be the source of the blood. For the next 15 minutes, you will wait for the tech to roll your child into X-Ray. You will be shocked to realize that brain hemorrhage was not one of the things you had anticipated. After the scan, you will wait another excruciating 15 minutes to learn that, in fact, his brain is alright. Well, technically there is nothing physically wrong with it, but the part of his brain that compelled him to climb/jump/fly is clearly overactive. The doctor is unable to see that lobe of the brain or identify the Kennedy Gene that your child could not have inherited from you. You will be given directions to avoid all pain medication for 24 hours, and best of all, you will be told to wake your child every hour for the entire night to make sure that he is readily responsive. (As if any child is readily responsive in the middle of the night. Even after extensive shaking/jumping on the bed/whisper screaming of his name.) The next morning, when your child looks as though he has gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson, but is otherwise fine, the whole scenario will seem a vivid hallucination. Only the bags under your eyes and your shortened life expectancy will be evidence of the hell your child has put you through. Again. (Life lost: 1.1 years)

**Editor's Note: Yesterday, S fell off the banister and landed hard: nothing but face. He did go to the hospital, and the CT was negative. He had a concussion and we were up all night, but thankfully he is ok today except for a massive bruise along the ENTIRE right side of his face.