In Which Cheese Saves My Child's Life

In his brother's absence this evening, Garrick was playing some solo imaginative game in his room, involving a fair degree of thumping about and general boisterousness. I was half-listening to him while resting in bed, my usual post-dinner position.

Garrick has always loved cheese. Runny, hard, stinky or sharp, he loves them all. So I wasn't too surprised to hear him banging around in the kitchen 20 minutes ago (a mere hour after dinner) putting together a cheese plate for himself as a snack.

A particularly loud closing of the pantry doors followed by a tinkle-crackle highly suggestive of breaking glass got me out of my bed, though. I flew down the stairs, expecting to find a jar of dried beans shattered and puddling around Garrick's (surely bare) feet.

But I found nothing but a puzzled 13-year-old. He'd heard the noise, too, but couldn't identify the source of it. So we hunted around the kitchen, pantries, closet and living room, and shrugged our shoulders upon finding nothing broken or knocked over. I went back to bed and Garrick ate his snack, then headed into the bathroom for his shower.

It wasn't until after his shower, when he got back to his bedroom, that we realized what had happened. The large glass globe covering the ceiling-mounted light fixture in his bedroom had inexplicably shattered, raining down glass in wicked five-inch daggers all over the bedroom. If Garrick hadn't decided to raid the cheese stash, he'd have been pelted with razor-sharp wedges of glass.

Holy crap, y'all.