Freaking out Mom

I spent about four hours truing up and tensioning the wheels on my Trek today. I feel better, but the weather sucked. I had to go to the bike shop twice. First time to pick up spokes (One of the little bastards snapped when I was tensioning it) and for tools to take the drive cassette off the hub so I could actually put the spokes on. I finished about 4:00 PM local time and decided I needed to take it on a shake down ride. So I head out on a short loop. The one I think of as "Old Road Loop" because there is a nice heavily eroded old road section about 50 yards long that I use to brush up on my technical skills. The whole thing is just a little over a miles. I planned to do two loops. SO I rode up the (brutal) hill. Along to the dirt and down. I'm feeling quite good. The bike if performing flawlessly, and I'm doing well, especially on the decent on the old road. At the bottom of it there is an asphalt curb about 3 inches high. As I got to it *BAM* the front of the bike grabs, I go over the handle bars. I hit HARD. No graceful roll, just slapped down like a dead fish. Pain shoots up from both hands and my right elbow. I feel the bike land on top of me and roll off. I begin to get up and I realize I can't breath. A moment of panic. I realize I've had the wind knocked out of me. I roll over onto my back and relax until I can breath again. I look first at the bike, everything looks OK. I look at my elbow, which was, by then, stinging furiously. Oh wow, lots of blood. I make sure it's not gushing, upright my bike, and ride home without doing a second loop. I clean up and clean my wounds (Not until after I took a picture of it which I'll post one I figure out how to do that). Fortunately work gave me a NICE first aid kit, so I had way more than I needed to properly clean it out. I noticed in the shower that I had a nasty bruise on my right thigh. Presumably from the sifter or the break lever as I went over. Over all I'm fine. This crash, at about 8-10 MPH did far more damage than when I crashed going 15-17 MPH, but the fundamental difference was what sort of surface I landed on, this time I landed on asphalt. OK. So why did it happen? Why did I crash? Well, pilot error. Right when I got to the curb I clamped on the break, because I wanted to make sure there was no traffic. The braking slowed the wheel and compressed the front shocks, so when I hit the curb, there was less momentum on the wheel, and the shocks had less room to compress to absorb the hit. These to factors caused the wheel to stop and the ensuing disaster. So what could I have done to avoid it? Well, not break until after the curb. In the past I've learned that speed can save with bumps like that. There was plenty of room on the pavement to stop or slow down to watch out for traffic, so next time, I let the break out, and pull up slightly on that front wheel to help it over.