What does "acceptable risk-taking" look like to you?

So now that we've got a little walker, playgrounds are looking a bit different.  It used to be the tunnels that drew her attention, but now we're on to bigger and better things.  Slides and stairs are calling her name loud and clear.  We met some friends at the playground the other day and somewhere in all the playing and climbing and laughing I got a chance to take a good hard look at myself and start thinking about what it is that "safe" means to me.  In terms of acceptable risk-taking.  Acceptable risk-taking by my 13 month old child.


My child.  Wow.  And I'd thought I'd gotten completely used to saying that....

I don't want to hold her back from exploring her limits and testing out the world or learning from experience.  I know that she will stumble and fall and will be just fine.  I know that she will often gauge my reactions, using them to help fine tune her own and develop ideas about the way things work.

But here's the thing.

She's my baby.

I'm thinking this may be the beginning of some of the trickier parts of parenting.  Hmm.

And I thought the earlier stuff was hard.

Yes, I let her climb the stairs, yes I let her go down the slide by herself, and yes I stood there and watched her tumble out of the higher end of the tunnel as she learned that it's better to back out of it than to go head first....  but it wasn't easy to do.  Although really, the playground equipment of today is pretty foolproof, safety-wise.  Certainly in comparison to the stuff I played on in elementary school, anyway.  I recall tall metal ladders that were burning hot in the sun and had no side rails, even at 10 or 12 feet up.  I recall large metal domes and metal climbing gyms placed over asphalt.  I remember hanging upside down from the horizontal bars of the large metal climbing gym over the asphalt.  What I don't remember is any of my classmates' brains going splat on the asphalt or legs breaking from falls over the side of the slide.

I remember doing my homework when I was maybe 8 years old, 6 or 8 feet up in a neighbor's tree, carefully wedged between two branches with my books balanced in front of me and a bowl of warm sugary Grape-Nuts in my lap.  I climbed trees in our yard and in the woods behind our house and sometimes I fell and got a bit scratched up, but I was alright.  I even remember once climbing high enough in the tree on the other side of my neighbor's house that I called to my parents over her roof and waved to them.  They weren't crazy about that.  But I was alright.

I'm glad my parents gave me some space to figure many things out on my own and didn't run after me holding my hand every step of the way.  I'm glad they let me dig in the dirt and climb trees and swing from grape vines.  I feel like there was a good balance there, in my childhood, of exercising caution and giving me freedom.  I hope to parent Claire in much the same way.  And yet as I write this and picture her climbing trees and metal domes and swinging from vines my heart is beating a little faster and I'm a tad nervous just thinking about it.

Because she's my baby.

Guess I have a ways to go.  Good thing she does, too.  I suppose we'll get there together.

I'm curious to hear from those of you who are parents.  What do safety and acceptable risk-taking mean to you?  What helped shape your ideas along the way?