Keeping them alive

Recently, an old friend and I were communicating via a popular social media site (Friendster, perhaps?).  She was soon due to birth her second child, and was experiencing the predictable excitement colored with a bit of dread.  And so, as I am wont to do, I began do dole out heaps of Rachael’s Unsolicited Advice on Life.  I commented things like yeah, coordinating naps is a hassle, and, the older one will have a period of adjustment.  But she was like, um, I’m more concerned with keeping them both alive.  Touché. 

Now, Big Sis Edie has given me sufficient scares to be sure.  Make no mistake: children do / try to do pretty much all of the things one is warned about, and all those things that one is instinctively afraid of.  Edie has subjected herself and me to plastic bags over her head, spastic slapping at an in-use stove top, nearly performing finger-amputation with my sewing scissors, and even splitting her eyebrow open by falling – from a seated position – onto a plastic mixing bowl at apparently just the perfect angle.  And all of this from a child who did not crawl until she was eleven months old and who has a relatively low threshold for danger.  

Just a little head glue.  No thang at all.

 

Edie also has a mom who has absolutely no threshold for danger.  I was the kid crying at the bottom of the mall escalator while her mom cheerily (frantically?) begged her to get on.  Kind of hard to obey when you are basically certain that this metal monster is going to inhale you and spit you out in ribbon form! Nowawdays, I get through life by bullying myself while involuntarily imagining nightmarish outcomes to everyday scenarios in order to get through these tasks.  Well, I tell myself after a bit of turbulence, if the plane is going down, my screams aren’t going to change anything, so I may as well sit back and try to relax before the engines explode.  But oddly, I’ve been able to take most of the kid stuff in stride.  At least in the moment of it all I stay calm.  Though I bet my grey hairs could be directly linked to my repressed terror. 

“Keeping the kids alive” is a jokey, self-deprecating parenting cliché.  But my son is making it a legitimate task these days.  And while I am still generally able to get by, he is making it a challenge.  And making it really, really hard to ever sit down to write anything like this.

Par exemple:

Eli has generally enjoyed his bassinet attachment on the stroller.  It’s comfy and unencumbered in there, giving him a bit of room to squirm around.  In fact, he quickly discovered that he could easily roll around in there, much to his delight.  But when, I (never had time to) wonder, is it time to graduate him to the five point restraint?  Maybe when walks become a game of whack-a-mole, except the mole is your son’s butt which keeps popping up as he attempts to crawl out of the bassinet and onto the sidewalk below.

Then there are other restraining devices.  Big sister loved her bouncie seat.  Eli?  He tolerated it for a bit.  But I started to get the feeling that it wasn’t his favorite place to be…

And then, there is this fun new activity.  I call it Socket Hunting.  No, actually I call it “bleargh!”  I captured this little series today once I could see the idea spark.  Not captured: me hurling my phone once I realized that he’d figured out how to scale the base boards at was thisclose to getting a digit in there.  Most likely a well-moistened digit.

My motherly instinct to act now and react later was pushed to what may be its limit last week when Eli did one of the most dreaded, most steeped in lore moves.  He is, of course, only seven months old, so I’m the first to point out that him “doing” always means me “letting.”  Which is to say, I know I’m to blame, but I also know that I try really hard!  Which is all to lead up to the event: he rolled off his changing table and fell to the ground.  He’s rolled off before, but into my arms.  And I know he’s a wild man up there, so I often have to resort to sweeping a leg over top him to pin his 17ish lb self down, much to his dislike.  This time, I turned my head to grab a diaper.  My arms were not on him but I thought that my body was close enough to feel him squirm so that I could stop anything before it happened.  I was right there.  But not quite right there, apparently, because after an eternal moment of silence, I heard a thud.  And then a worse silence.  And then, quite happily, a scream.  In the moment, I wasn’t surprised or upset. I held him and rocked him, and he was so frightened.  Only later, I was frightened too.  But he’s 100%, and he learned just absolutely nothing at all from the experience.  I stress-ate half a roll of Thin Mints and vowed to do better.  Somehow I’m still optimistic, though, that I’m going to keep them all alive.