Dec
4
Whoah, that last post was kind of a bummer. It sounds like I’m just sitting around constantly thinking about this Terrible Thing that could have happened to my baby, when in fact we have moved into the black humor stage, as evidenced by JB cheerily announcing to me this morning that he had checked the monitor and that Dylan was just sleeping with his toy cord, but gosh it sure was quiet in there.
Oh, I know. I could never even tell you half of the awful things JB and I joke about, because it’s really . . . well, we’re clearly going to straight to hell in an Astroglided handbasket.
Anyway, I’m posting again to move the creepy entry down the page a little and to ask you something that is driving me CRAZY lately: those of you with experience dealing with that mysterious creature that is the three-year-old, is it normal for a kid to refuse to say what’s wrong with them? Like when they’re whining and half-crying about something but they will NOT tell you what it is, even if you practically give yourself a hernia trying to sweetly and supportively cajole it out of them? And later it turns out they stubbed their toe or some shit? Because Riley has been doing this a lot lately, and it sort of makes me lose my damn mind — I spend X amount of time trying to get him to talk and trying to comfort him, then I try to distract him, and then if it goes on too long and I’m really having one of those oh-so-admirable Mommy Dearest moments, I bark at him to just STOP it already. Which, ugh. Smooth move, Ex-Lax.
It’s super frustrating, but it also just makes me feel bad, because I want to help. I’m not the most capable human being on earth but by god I can kiss a boo-boo and I can whip up a PB&J for a hungry belly, you know? But it’s like we’re the interrogators and he’s the stubborn prisoner refusing to give up his comrades’ location.
Are you familiar with this behavior? What course of action would you recommend when we’re dealing with it?
Dec
4
When Dylan started being able to do more than lie helplessly on his back waving his appendages in the air like a grumpy, overturned crab, we pulled his crib away from the wall and away from the wooden blinds that cover the window. I remember doing the same thing with Riley — specifically, I remember the moment when I read a local news story about the death of a baby at a home daycare, a strangling accident involving window blinds, and I remember putting down the newspaper and pulling the crib even further towards the middle of the room, shuddering.
Yesterday morning I heard Dylan grousing around in his bed and since he didn’t sound frantic I took my time going in there, stopping to make coffee first and let the dog out. When I opened his door he did his usual joyous routine of grinning hugely and clapping his hands, but I didn’t even see his happy face: I was too distracted by the electrical cord wrapped around his entire torso.
He’d reached through his crib bars and somehow managed to snag the thin white cord that runs down the wall from the small camera mounted above the window — the video monitor camera that points at his mattress, which we keep on at night until we go to bed. He was hopelessly tangled in the cord, it ran under his arms and around his chest and looped over one curling toe, and he sat there making his weird little R2-D2 bloops and bleeps at me, like, a little help over here?
My imagination needs no encouragement to go skittering down some pretty dark alleyways and I could envision with perfect clarity the horrific alternate outcome of this situation. The blue-faced, silent baby. The cord pulled tight around his neck. His body, twisted with its efforts to get free; the inevitable surrender.
Yes. Well. So. The crib is now in the middle of the damn room, practically. The cord has been secured out of anyone’s reach, even my own. We have all moved on to cheerier topics, except for the part where I keep seeing it, over and over. The cord. The baby. The unspeakable, unlivable possibility of what might have been.
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