I came in late from an evening visit to my local Shoppers Drug Mart last night (SDM in wholesaler-speak) last night. This in itself is no great surprise, any number of my friends can tell you that I am ALWAYS at the SDM. I sneak out once the children have gone to bed (not to worry, the fantastical Senor Biceps is still at home with them, AKA my husband) to indulge in some mommy time and usually pick up some kind of necessity for home (bread, milk, munchies, melatonin). So I got in the front door, and promptly went back out in my slippers to ensure I didn’t leave the seat-heater plugged in. I did this once and it not only fried the seat heater, ensuring me a cold bum for the rest of the winter, but completely drained the Mystery Machine’s battery and she wouldn’t start in the morning.

Seat heater unplugged, I’m heading back in when I tripped going back up the stairs to my front door. I fell to the stairs in a resounding crash, landing on my knees, hands, and almost my face. I considered seriously NOT getting up again ever. I was hurting so bad I had that shaky-pukey feeling. I made it back inside and up to bed, but just barely. Upstairs, Hubs asks me what happened. I told my tale in a shaky voice, and showed the large dust stains on my knees. He says “Oh, I was wondering, I thought you dropped something. All I heard was a thump-thump CRASH!!” Umm, yeah. Thanks hubs, I love you too. It’s ok, don’t drag yourself out of bed on my account, it’s not like I was lying on the porch hurt or something.

Anyway.

I was lying there, after my extra strength Advil, and saying to Hubs, “I don’t remember falling hurting this much as a kid, and I fell all the time.” Which led me to think vaguely about physics, and largely about an episode of The Real Ghostbusters that I saw once. The guys were shrunk down to the size of ants, and when they got flung from a car, Egon said it didn’t hurt because they had so little body mass.

So here I am today, with pretty much every muscle and joint from my neck down in some form of agony thinking about the physics of falling. Some quick research (read: Google and pick from the first page) found this website. Where when I input the measurements from my son, I get and average impact force of 1960 N (I think it means Newtons? He discovered gravity right? I HATE him). Now, using the same formula, lets say I weigh 120 lbs (I don’t but I’d like to say I do), factoring in my height, the average impact force is 9819.599999999996 N. Nice. So I weigh more than I did as a 4 year old (duh), because of that I fall harder and to top it all off, I’m older, so I don’t heal as fast.

I may just give up and get one of those sweet power scooters and a life alert necklace.