There's a joke in our culture that goes something like, "He must have been dropped on his head as a baby." It's usually said in a lighthearted way, but for some of us parents who have accidentally injured our kids, it's not so funny.

After five years of not inflicting so much as a miniscule scratch on my boys, I managed to practically mutilate one of them this summer.

Incident No. 1 happened in June, when I unintentionally slammed Levi's fingers in the door of our Jeep. It was one of those moments when I saw it happening, but there was nothing I could do because it was too late. I simply slammed the door, and he reached inside the car at the very last second to grab a Transformer action figure and the next thing I knew he was screaming louder than a locomotive with his middle fingertip looking flattened and red.

Days later, his fingernail fell off -- revealing a small but nasty black-and-purple bruise -- and not even the highly-coveted Spiderman band-aids could cheer him up. He was freaked out by the missing nail, and so was I. My mom told me a story about doing a similar thing to my sister, but I still felt like Mother Stupidhands.

His fingernail had barely grown back when the the second incident -- a devastating soup mishap -- occurred. I warmed up a can of soup on my stovetop -- it was Campbell's chicken noodle; I'll never be able to see the label without cringing -- and I didn't boil it, but the soup was definitely warm.

You probably know where this is going: Within seconds of giving him the bowl of soup, he dumped it in his lap. Ironically, I was on my way to the fridge to get an ice cube for my Diet Coke, and suddenly Levi was hysterical, with a bright red groin area and little round noodles stuck to his penis.

I rushed him to the bathtub and splashed cold water on his wounds, applied a soothing Chinese salve, and called a nurse from our doctor's office who said it didn't seem bad enough to bring him in. She was so nice to me on the phone that I actually wept a little, and reassured me in a warm, maternal voice that this kind of thing happens all the time.

Later that night, I shared the soup story with a friend who told me that her son pulled the cord of a percolator filled with hot coffee on top of his delicate one-year-old body. Another woman told me about her friend who was stung by a bee, dropped her baby and he broke his arm. Yet another friend busted out with a story about how her daughter rolled off her changing table onto a wood floor twice in the same week.

Thanks to their honesty and humor, I felt a little less like a negligent dumb ass. I realized that I spend so much time thinking about how fragile my kids' lives are, that I had forgotten how resilient these little crayon-eaters really are.

Levi ended up with two blisters below his belly button and yes, one on his groin. Imagine a kid with a heavy lisp saying, "I got a blister on my penis." Hearing him say that almost makes me laugh -- but not quite.