Sometimes being a dad means doing the really hard stuff.
Today in 2018, a dad in Sydney, Australia saw his kid in danger and put himself on the line to make sure that kid was safe.
Brad Lewis wasn’t exactly a stranger to danger; he had served in the military and had done deep-sea diving.
But I don’t think he was expecting anything high-risk at the time of this incident.
He was playing Nerf guns with his eight year old son Oscar at a friend’s house.
The youngster shot a few projectiles at his old man; they went over a balcony on the second floor of the house.
The kid wanted to see where they’d gone, so he started pushing himself up on the railing, which is when he lost his balance and started falling over the side.
Lewis saw what was happening; he raced over to try to grab onto his son, but his momentum carried him over the railing, too.
In a split second, knowing that they were both tumbling off the side of the house onto the concrete, Lewis did what so many dads would do in that situation: he put his kid first.
He held Oscar tight, shielding the boy from the worst of the fall.
The impact did knock the eight year old out for a bit, and he did suffer some injuries, but in all, the shielding had worked.
Oscar’s dad, on the other hand, was in rough shape.
A 13 foot fall can be manageable if you’re landing on your feet.
But Lewis landed very differently on the hard concrete, as you can tell from his injuries: a fractured skull, fractured vertebra, a broken rib, bruises on the brain, and a huge gash running from the top of his head down to his ear.
It took 45 stitches to close that up, and the family said doctors couldn’t believe that he’d survived the fall at all.
But Lewis’s top concern wasn’t his own health, it was Oscar’s: friends said that after the fall, he kept asking “are the kids ok?”
And they were, thanks to their dad’s quick thinking, bravery and willingness to face danger so they wouldn’t have to.
Today in 1922, a very quiet moment in the history of telecommunications.
It was the day of the funeral for telephone pioneer Alexander Graham Bell, and as those services began, American telephone exchanges paid tribute by closing for one minute.
Heroic father breaks skull leaping off 4m balcony to cushion son’s fall (News.com.au)
Telephones Were Silenced for One Minute After Alexander Graham Bell Died (Smithsonian)
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