I said another “s” word as I ran to scoop Ray off the floor, which Andy — of course — practiced rolling off his tongue as the three of us dashed to the car.

My parents never allowed us  to swear or say “Shut up” or “That’s retarded” or “Loser.”

My husband and I banned those words in our home, too.

But that day, about eight minutes past noon, I fluttered my hands and said “Shut up!!!” to Andy, 4, when he peppered me with questions during the crisis.

Three minutes earlier, when Ray, 2,  finished eating lunch, the chair’s back legs caught on a grout line in the tile kitchen floor as he pushed back from the table.

I was wringing a washcloth at the sink when I heard the chair and his head smack the hard surface.

Then, for a split second, I heard nothing at all.

I do not live with much fear, but fear found me fast.

It wrapped around me like a parka on a sweltering August afternoon, and I could barely breathe or move or think as I waffled between calling 911 or speeding Ray to the nearest hospital.

He screamed then, like an old-fashioned tornado siren that warms up before hitting its full-blast pitch.

Ray flailed his arms and legs, too, as he cried in the flipped turtle position from the booster seat buckled to the chair that tipped — a chair we brought up from the basement.

Though a mismatch next to the other four chairs around the table, it has a much wider base. So, my husband, David, and I banked on it safeguarding Ray, who sits there like a kingy boy.

It did. It held steady hundreds of times until it caught on the grout line, which transformed the chair’s back footpads into a fulcrum.

The doctor, a British woman who spent most of her career working on a Navajo reservation, assured me that Ray somehow bounced through the crisis.

She felt his skull and listened to his heart and his lungs with her stethoscope, one decorated with Native American beading.

He fidgeted, jabbered and kept pointing to toys scattered around the exam room.

A child with a skull fracture or brain bleed would be curled in the fetal position by now, she said.

The back of his head might feel “boggy.” His pupils might dilate, and he would vomit, she added.

Dr. Hardy recalled treating another child who fell from a second story window and walked away from the incident unaltered.

Of course, she also treated kids who fell from somewhere, hit the ground and never walked on it the same way again.

But on Tuesday, Ray was OK, and it was I who walked on forever changed — stamped anew with a respect for near misses and for the mysterious net that can catch us when we fall.

The joke always was that Grandpa could cut your hair or do your makeup as long as you were lying down.

Our family laughs about this because we believe death is not above humor, and that belief gave him the resilience to work in the death business for more than 50 years.

However, on that summer night, circa 1979, my then 10-year-old brother perched on a kitchen stool while Grandpa stood to cut his mop top.

The pic shows a suntanned Michael laughing, tucking his chin and clutching a bath towel around his neck to keep the bleach-blonde hair falling like dandelions gone to seed  off his clothes.

This image of loved ones came to mind for the first time in years last week, when my husband opened our brand-new, $21.85 barber kit and read the directions.

As he parked the kids — one at a time — in a chair on the back patio, turned on the power and began shearing our shaggy boys, I began hoping.

I hoped that we might not need to donate the kit and go to the salon first thing in the morning.

I usually take our kids to a franchise in a strip mall, a place that feels like it came from a kit for the fact that nobody bothered to bolt the chairs to the floor.

So, when my boys start horsing around, the stylist always warns them that the fun swivel chair with a pump foot could topple and kill them.

May be I got tired of the scolding, although I completely appreciate why those ladies spelled out the chair situation every time.

I get that young boys pitch a special kind of fit when clippers start buzzing.

The wiggling, the ducking and the shrieking got on my nerves, too.

Foregoing that hassle, along with saving about $60 every six weeks, ultimately inspired me give the kit a try and my husband a chance to really shine in the new role I gave him — one that goes beyond fixing toilets and mowing the lawn to approach creating art.

David did not like the assignment.

The “after” haircut photo I took of him with the kids looks like a poster for wanted outlaws.

But I am happy with the haircuts and happy with making a homespun iconic image to give the next generation pause.

ALL OF THE WOMEN and men stood off stage in the shadows and listened to their biography being read — which included the sexual assault most survived as children — before striding into the bright lights to model black, blue and white denim designs.

These unlikely models stepped up before about 200 people on Wednesday for Denver’s first annual Denim Day — a fashion show that recruits sex assault survivors to model the fabric associated with a growing international movement.

In 1997, a 45-year-old driving instructor picked up his student — an 18-year-old woman living in Rome, Italy.

She expected to get her first driving lesson and, instead, survived rape. The student reported the crime, and the Italian court convicted the instructor and sentenced him to jail.

However, the Italian Supreme Court overturned the conviction months later.

“Because the victim wore very, very tight jeans, she had to help him remove them. . . . And by removing the jeans . . . it was no longer rape, but consensual sex,” the judge wrote.

Denim Day here and around the world brings attention to the ancient question of culpability between adults in this matter.

However, an estimated one in four girls and one in six boys suffer sexual abuse before age 18, though only one in 10 ever discloses the abuse, according to the National Children’s Alliance, a professional membership organization that helps communities respond effectively to allegations of child abuse.

Fault is 100 percent clear in these cases.

Child sex assault survivor Tracey Ellis of Colorado Springs felt butterflies in her gut before she modeled a black denim outfit.

“It’s a hard thing to get up on the stage and say, ‘Here is my life. Let me tell you the shitty part,’” she said.

Yet, incest survivor Lori Krout used her title as MS. NORTH AMERICA 2012 to organize and emcee the event sponsored by The Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault during April –  Sexual Assault Awareness Month and National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

By donning denim fashions created and donated by local designers, the Highlands Ranch woman hopes other survivors can shed some of their guilt and shame.

It’s about telling the story and reminding society that this is not a stranger danger crime, Krout said.

Eighty percent to 95 percent of child victims know the perpetrator, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

Krout, whose father got convicted and sent to prison in 2008, just before Krout’s statute of limitations ran out,  agreed to be interviewed for a Times-Call story I wrote earlier this month to raise awareness:  www.timescall.com/news/longmont-local-news/ci_20451154/child-sex-assault-survivor-tells-story-being-lured.

She invited me to the Denim Day event and I attended with Meg Hargett, 46, the other woman who agreed to share her story in the newspaper of being sexually assaulted at age 14 in 1980 by one of her ninth grade teachers at a Longmont middle school.

That evening, we learned that The Arc, a 62-year old organization that supports those with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families, donated all of the denim from its thrift stores.

The donation reflects the Arc’s interest in reminding attendees that those with disabilities — children and adults like my little Ray Ray, who has Down syndrome — are more than twice as likely as their typical peers to be sexually assaulted, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice.

Processing this type of information could make all of us retreat quietly to the shadows to mourn what about us makes this so.

Instead, the fashion show reminded me how ordinary people, like ordinary jeans, can get redesigned into something extraordinarily beautiful in spite of being used.

“It’s Friday!” he would thunder from that old pulpit at Park Avenue Church in Minneapolis.

“But Sunday’s coming!” the congregation would answer.

The rhyme and reason of this call and response harkens to Holy week, when some folks every spring still wear black on Good Friday to mourn the death of Christ and wait for the resurrection we celebrate on Easter Sunday.

Skeptics call this wishful thinking.

We call it good faith, and good faith is so good — whether you believe in the “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” version or not.

I got the message sitting in the pew.   I lived it in one way from the driver’s seat every winter crossing icy Midwestern roads.

Nobody tries to fishtail, but fishtail you will if you drive enough miles there.

And that feeling of hanging on — of using every catlike instinct on the wheel, the brake and the gas pedal to manage the terrible hand of physics toying with the car — reminds me of good faith.

Somewhere between oncoming traffic and the ditch, the windshield takes on this aquarium feel — that surreal sense of big things looming and disappearing.

That is when good faith gets real to help the driver ride out the crisis.

Skeptics call this survival instinct.

But in my book, it’s more.

Good faith is the give-and-take tension between someone and something much, much bigger.

Those who start small and hope big — which describes most parents I know — need this kind of faith.

Horse trainers such as Nicolette Ahrens do, too.

Though not a parent, the young, newlywed livestock agent at the Colorado State University Extension office in Longmont welcomed a paint filly into her family around 3 a.m. on a Thursday three weeks ago.

My three sons and my helper, Sophie, on Saturday road tripped 90 miles north and east to Brush to meet her, the mare she trained when she was a 13-year-old girl and the  foal that her parents care for during the week.

Times-Call photographer, Matthew Jonas, showed up, too.

Fresh starts make great spectacles.

So, we plan to make the drive a lot over the next three years to document how a shy, wobbly-legged creature matures into a confident, sound riding horse.

Good faith is not the same good insurance.

It doesn’t protect anyone from bad debt, a stubborn bad habit, an aching heart or a derailed Plan A.

A horse can break a leg.

Humans break in a million other tragic ways.

Good faith is not gunning for something and getting it, necessarily.

It is working with what you get and trusting that Friday’s trouble makes Sunday’s dawn a wonder in its very own way.

On some level this is snicker material — if you are not the parent of the child doing the mooning.

But as the mother of that kid, the one who dropped trou, the incident came with no gasp of comic relief.

Upon getting the bad news, all I could do was thank Carl’s teachers for taking swift action.

In school, we call such behavior “socially inappropriate.” On the street, the law calls it criminal.  So went my thoughts. . .

The teachers and I shared a moment of serious disappointment. I am grateful that they pulled him out of circulation and let him sit with himself alone that hour.

It worked. He cried and did not like it one bit, they said.

But as my boy and I silently walked hand-in-hand away from the school that afternoon to our car, a part of me felt like I should have sat in the office with him.

Right or wrong, parents like me feel a sense of culpability in almost everything that a young child under our wing does or does not do.

What did Carl and I miss in all of our lessons together during the past six years that allowed for this stunt?

Like me, this boy is full of sound effects and wiggles.

We love to laugh and get other people laughing, too.

May be that explains part of it — but not all of it.

I buckled Carl’s seat belt, shifted into drive and started puzzling my puzzler to figure out the best way to address the situation at home.

What to do?

About a quarter of a mile down the road, Carl — who sits on a booster seat directly behind my driver’s seat — spoke up.

“Mama?” he said.

“Yes, Carl,” I said, wishing that the rear-view mirror would crane around more and let me see the little face looking out the window.

“Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “Well, sometimes you have a little bit of black on your heart.”

Hmmmm. . .

When my husband got home from work, we talked to Carl about the incident, about being respectful and socially appropriate in ways we hoped he understood.

But sometimes, the child and the good Lord work out a bad situation before the parents get to the bottom of it.

I understood that much, and it was enough for both Carl and me to go on at the next bell.

Sun poured through the windows over the sandwich board, which read: “Today’s Special         Slow Down.”

Like the other patron, I took the message to heart.

But on Tuesday — when we enjoyed a sunny, 73-degree day not felt in Boulder County since Oct. 24, 2011 — I had already gotten off to a good start that way.

I cooked my little trio a hot breakfast before dropping Carl, 6, off at kindergarten.

Then, Ray, 2, Andy, 4, and I played at a park until mid-morning snack time rolled around and we got a hankering for the pancakes this mama can’t yet make just right at home.

Something about the unseasonably warm weather inspired me on the way to the cafe  to find the details beyond eye level that get lost in a hurry.

They included survivors from the 19th century: a Methodist church bell; the old city hall false front with a bell; and the painted tin ceiling in the cafe.

Sooner than later, I also paused just to take in the finer points of my two younger boys.

Andy wanted honey and only a little blueberry syrup on his pancakes and managed to get most of both on his paws, the booth upholstery, the salt shaker, etc.

Meanwhile, Ray kept using sign language for “more” and pointing at the blueberry syrup.

No matter how sunny and slow going the day, I need lots of Wet Wipes and patience  on restaurant excursions.

Nevertheless, as our waitress chatted up a regular customer about a snowstorm that recently stranded her mother in Minnesota, the kids and I wiped our chins, left money on the table and meandered back to the park to play with our shoes off in the sand volleyball court.

These two rovers later drifted easily into their naps after lunch and a story time with books about penguins and pumpkins and Black Beauty.

Even I — someone who needs to toss all of her clutter into ten laundry baskets and rent a motel room some weekend to sort it in peace — rested beside Andy under a fuzzy throw blanket.

So refreshed, we picked up Carl at kindergarten that afternoon to finish the day with an adventure sized right for every member of my backseat bunch.

We stopped at McDonald’s — a place Andy still calls ‘Donald’s.

I rarely correct him.

I kinda like kid speak, which includes Carl calling tomatoes “tornadoes” and my niece, Maddie, calling lightning “lightling.”

We ordered shamrock shakes and a strawberry one for little Ray, who frowns at mint flavor.

Then, because the adventure called, we got straws instead of spoons and enjoyed our treat on the road as we headed east to Fort Lupton.

There is the namesake town in Weld County, a large neighboring county with lots of horses, livestock and dusty roads.

Then, there’s the historic fort so called for the fur trader, Lancaster Lupton, who built it in 1837 as a post and refuge from the Cheyenne.

When the kids and I toured the grounds, it bothered Carl to no end that I could not tell him who the bad guys and good guys were.

It’s complicated, you know.

Despite the tanglings then between people groups, Lupton forged a lasting marriage with an Indian chief’s daughter. They had eight children together.

Our family has just begun to understand that time and place a half-hour from our home.

But we got a good start thanks to the South Platte Valley Historical Society’s reconstruction based on the fort’s ruins.

Though closed for the winter season, the fort’s tall walls stirred our curiosity about trappers, traders, Indians and the mysteries of the long ago and far away.

And we talked about how nature, namely the South Platte River running past, probably had changed very little between today and when the Cheyenne depended on it for water and food.

The property also now features a renovated and relocated clapboard schoolhouse — one built in the area in 1875 after children outgrew two other log schoolhouses.

Carl and Andy stood on stumps to peer through its windows and spied portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln hanging on the wall.

About then, the sun started to set and our bellies began to grumble.

So, we left.

But Carl keeps begging to go back, and I’m so pleased that slow days spent with my children come with some afterglow.

She came into focus for me last September, when my husband, the three kids and I traveled to Alcova, Wyo. — about 30 miles southwest of Casper — to visit Kimmy, my youngest first cousin.

When we arrived around midnight, Kim met us at the main road in a green Gator — something Carl and McCoy, another relative, would commandeer for joy riding.

At that late hour, though, Kim used it to guide us down a hill to side-by-side mobile homes for seasonal staff at the private Casper Boat Club where she worked for her aunt.

In the morning, I peeked out of her trailer’s kitchen window.

Dusty red rock cliffs flanked the reservoir, which seemed strewn with 100,000 diamonds for how it sparkled.

Fifteen minutes later, with the coffee brewed, Carl and I drove with Kim through this lonesome country to Casper for her SCUBA lesson.

I mostly just sipped coffee on the deck after we arrived and tried to keep my boy from jumping in the pool with her and her instructor.

But as Kim trolled the pool floor, I also reflected a bit on how her SCUBA gear allowed her to go into another world, and how our trip to Wyoming did the same for me.

All of the tumbleweeds tumbling there made me wonder more about how that pioneer woman kept her kids warm, fed and schooled in the three “Rs.”

She needed fortitude like most of us probably never will need.

Yet, I suppose that she did what so many modern women do.

We keep trying to do the next right thing, be it nursing the baby, stoking the fire, washing clothes and dishes, marching off to work, remembering to hug loved ones and strangers, too, sometimes.

I hope she got lots of bright spots, even as she worked out her life in the midst of high winds that sent tumbleweeds bouncing by.

I got one of them before we kissed Kim “goodbye” and left Alcova at Sunday noon.

After much practice, my little Ray Ray — at age 21 months — stood up!

His stood up on his own in his special white shoes with inserts that stabilize his weak ankles and feet.

Ray looked like a boy trying to negotiate an imaginary hula hoop.

But like the pioneer woman, he did his best to take a stand, and he did the next right thing.

Then and now, bravo!

“Because there was a tornado,” he said.

My middle kid, my 4-year-old boy, then went back to rearranging furniture in the dollhouse my Mother played with in the 1940s and my siblings and I played with in the 1970s.

Mom gave it to my three boys last Christmas after I found it shipwrecked and rusting in one of the barns at our family’s farm in Illinois.

It had been so long since anyone cleaned its dark red roof, shined its floors — all of them painted with area rugs or linoleum — or wiped down the fancy wallpaper patterns.

So, I hauled it into the house and laughed at the way my Mom and I both remembered its details — from the swan painted on the bathroom walls to the way the tiny furniture fits in every room.

The light blue bunk beds stack and come with a detachable ladder. The kitchen includes all of the appliances along with plates to go with the table and chairs. A white scale goes with the bathroom, and a clock sits on the fireplace mantle — if you want it to go there.

Ray, 2, just likes to push the dollhouse around inside of our house, which has simulated tornado-like conditions.

But watching Carl, 6, and Andy sorting  the jumbled contents in their own way gives me a good take on why  so many of us play house when we’re little.

We like to set up our world just so, however that looks to us and without regard for how it looks to anyone else.

Real life makes most of us get over this kind of play, and I get the practical side of that.

People who insist on “just so” seem tiresome, indeed.

Saying “Good enough!” can keep a person sane.

But watching my kids delight in doing their “just so” stuff in the dollhouse makes me think twice about the concept at work in the big house — how some just so play might make my day and theirs.

Seems like only older ladies wear these birthstone rings, women who finally got the money and the perspective to keep a hand on glints of the persons they carried, mothered and one day freed like white doves to a blue sky.

For me, though, Wednesday would not have been a great day to visit the jeweler.

I woke up dogged by a headache for having stayed up too late again.

Housework, writing and all the other stuff that I need to do or actually like to do takes a back seat to bringing up three boys during their waking hours.

And on Wednesday, a day designated by Andy’s preschool teachers as pajama day, the pressure of all those things left undone smacked into a morning of haywire situations.

By way of background, my husband and I suspect that Ray, 2, tossed a sock or a small stuffed animal in the upstairs toilet.

I can write about our clogged toilet only because we suspect that the clog is something like a sock or a stuffed animal versus like something else.

My husband dutifully tried several methods of unclogging it before telling me that he needed to buy a snake at the hardware store, and I needed to be the one working it in the toilet or feeding it to the person working it.

Well, despite the fact that we’re throwing a party here tonight for our friends who have children with Down syndrome,  David put a toddler child-proof device on this toilet to prevent Ray and everyone else from opening it until he gets around to buying the snake.

Since I’m not up for snake shopping, I can’t complain.

Back to Wednesday morning.

The toilet lid lock stumped little Andy, 4, and he piddled on his  pajamas 2 minutes before we were supposed to walk out the door for school.

Carl, 6, hollered the news of Andy’s wet duds and the bathroom’s wet floor as I tied Ray’s shoes downstairs.

Not 15 seconds later, Carl said Andy literally had been playing with matches before the bathroom incident.

We finally piled into the car with me fuming and fantasizing about my single girl days of driving to work sipping coffee and singing along to the radio.

Perfect parents out there might point out that the strife up to then — about 8:22 a.m. — was my doing.

They would be right.

I should have gone to bed at 10 p.m., not after midnight;  should have pitied Andy for  encountering the toilet his father and I disabled; should have kept the matches under lock and key; and, finally, should have kept one eye on the rear view mirror and another on the windshield while driving to school to preempt tussling betwixt my backseat bunch.

I let all of those truths make me feel like a prospective runaway mom for the rest of the day.

But then I got some grace, a sense of when it’s my fault or when it’s my kid’s fault, it helps to be more like Mount Everest — to stay calm and make my own weather just like big mountains do.

Remembering this image the next time circumstances get chaotic won’t change all of our missteps.

But it will help me to be more intentional about giving my kids better emotional weather and treasuring them — ring or no.

Andy and I visit some of my old college roommates in Minnesota in May 2008.

In the late 1980s, midway through our four-year education, our Christian college finally relaxed its ban on dancing to allow “dancing with discretion.”

So, we danced!

I returned to that era of my life after reading the news on Saturday that Houston’s staff found her dead at 48 in a bathtub at the Beverly Hills Hilton — a tragedy very likely related to her drug and alcohol abuse.

What happened to that that singer with the pipes that got us off the couch for study breaks?

I stayed up on Tuesday until 1:30 a.m. to troll the internet for footage that would tell more of her story, and I found it.

I watched Houston perform at her best — for instance, when she sang the National Anthem with a bewitching mix of elegance and raw power in 1991 for Super Bowl XXV at Tampa Stadium.

I also viewed her worst –her 2010 show in Birmingham, England, during which fans booed and afterward complained to the media about spending the equivalent of $105 to hear the strung-out queen of pop croak “I Will Always Love You.”

Houston got lost in stardust.

But listening this week to the ethereal climb of her voice — one described as coming along just once in a generation — helped me reflect again on her tremendous gift and the friends that celebrated it with me once upon a time.

Life is different now, of course.

And while I dearly love my old roommates and always will, God provides — a favorite saying of ours then and now.

These days, instead of swapping clothes and curling irons with them, I pass all sorts of things over the fence to my neighbor, April.

She passes all sorts of things my way, too.

We joked about it recently and tried to exhaustively list the items: a Chewbacca Halloween costume that her son, Jack, outgrew in time for Ray to wear last October; books; recipes; phone numbers; crock pots; muffin tins; a meat mallet; cookies; soup; rolls; blueberry oatmeal bread; raisin bran muffins; cake; white wine vinegar; chili; beef stew; onions; garlic; tomatoes; milk; flour; a whole chicken; various spices; eggs and the “love can.”

No hit songs anchor this time, but it is the same sisterhood.

In mid November, April knew that my husband, David, was on a business trip. She knew I would be stretched thin with managing my three little ones from bell to bell every day.

So, she surprised me by passing some homemade cream of broccoli soup and wheat bread over the fence to relieve me of dinner duty one night.

As the kids and I sat down to eat from our steaming bowls, Andy tasted his first spoonful.

“Yummy!” he said. “April put lots of sugar in this soup, Mama!”

“No, Andy,” I said. “She used the love can.”

This empty spice can sits on our stove range. But at that time, I had passed it over the fence for her to check out.

Red lettering on the white can’s front panel reads: “LOVE Spice for Living NET WT. Immeasurable.”

A side panel lists these ingredients: “Faithfulness, Gentleness, Goodness, Joy, Kindness, Patience, Peace, Perseverance, Protection, Trust, Truthfulness and Unselfishness.”

Cooks can keep the can on the stove shelf to remind them to add all of the above to whatever they make.

I tasted that secret ingredient whenever I ate at my maternal grandparents’ home, which explains why I gave them the can when I spotted it at a novelties shop in 1986.

My Grandmother gave it to me in April when she downsized to move into assisted living.

Andy seemed reasonably satisfied with the love can explanation I gave for April’s good cooking.

He dipped his spoon in her soup a few more times before looking up with a final question.

“Mama?  Does everyone have a love can?” he said.