Parenting Fail: Baby in a Box

The purpose of this blog is to be honest, to strip the lies and get down to what we are really about.

Sometimes being a parent means we pretend to be perfect.  Dress the kids up, shove all the dirt under the carpet, unwrap some store bought muffins and toss them in a basket so it looks like you baked them and act like everything is under control.  But come on... we are all just making this up as we go and along the way we make some mistakes.  Some of those mistakes are small, others are large... I am going to stop the pretending, be honest and share some of mine (although the muffins on the counter probably are homemade...). 

July 1, 2014

I put my baby girl (18 months old, whom I shall call Little Bit) down for her nap after lunch.  My son did not want to play in his room and I decided I was not going to argue with him, so he was playing train on the floor while I ate my lunch, worked on the computer and watched a little TV.  This sounds wonderful right? 

Well it was until I thought I heard a noise coming from upstairs, a noise like Little Bit crying.  I paused and listened some more, trying to gauge how serious this was before getting up.  After a few moments or so I could still hear her, but it was pretty muffled.  Mommy alarms started going off, concerned I paused the show and headed upstairs.  The closer I got the more concerned I got as the crying seemed muffled and yet pretty hysterical. 

As I opened the door I started doing a quick survey of the room... Little Bit was not in her bed... I did not see her on the floor... where was my baby...?  And then I saw her, or at least part of her.  Her two little legs, kicking and sticking out of the top of a box I had put in her room to hold some of her toys.  Apparently she had reached inside for a toy on the bottom and had fallen in and gotten stuck.  I rushed over to her and pulled her out... poor crying red faced baby who had also gotten so scared that she had thrown up in this awful upside down state. 

   by  Etolane 

I immediately checked my tiny Little Bit over and she was okay, breathing fine and no longer throwing up.  Quickly I cleaned her up and then just held her, curling up in my bed until I got her to calm back down. 

Response

Once I got Little Bit calmed down and felt certain that everything was going to be okay I realized that I needed to learn from this harrowing experience. 

The first thing was the box she had fallen into.  I had misjudged how tall and narrow it was in comparison to her little body, so when she toppled into it she was unable to push herself back up and out of it.  That box has already made it into the trash pile and is no longer in my house.  Since then I have replaced it with a plastic milk crate, these boxes are lower and wider than the old box.  The toys fill the space better and Little Bit should be able to get herself back out of it if she were to fall in again. 

Second was installing the baby monitor in the room again.  I had thought that I could hear well enough between the floors (the walls are thin here) but again I had misjudged things.  The baby monitor came back out and was put back in the room.  It did not do well with the move, and is pretty full of static, so a new one is on its way from Amazon.  Nothing fancy mind you, but enough to keep me better appraised of what is going on upstairs. 

Crisis solved and hopefully avoided in the future (at least that one... we shall see what new crisis they invent for me tomorrow).