What do you think the scariest things are for a Mother? Something bad happening to their kids of course! I experienced my first ‘I am a terrible Mother’ incident just this morning. Both Mother and Baby have recovered from the traumatic event but today Mama is having a glass of wine with dinner! Luckily Baby Michael only suffered the two marks that you see pictured above and a tiny scratch on his eye lid. One of those marks is a carpet burn and one is a bruise. (yes he is chewing on a chicken wing teether!) I did take him into the pediatrician’s office just as a precaution though!
Michael loves playing with our cats. The cats hate playing with the baby because he doesn’t pet them, he pulls on them, so they run away. With Michael getting faster as his all impressive one armed army crawl the cats are running sooner and going places he can’t get to AKA the stairs. You might be wondering why we are playing upstairs. Well Michael is bored with the Family Room and wants to explore other areas and items. The cats are pretty smart and have started to lounge on the stairs versus the floor because he can’t get to them. Well curiosity killed the cat and sure did rattle our household today.
One minute I look over and my child is playing with the pile of shoes on the floor and the next minute I hear “thud, thud, thud, smack!” Son of a …! I can’t run down to the bottom of the stairs quick enough. I pick up your child who is face down on the tile floor and try not to react. The overwhelming feeling of guilt starts to creep in but I have to keep my cool because I don’t want to upset my baby.
I take him up to his nursery and try to console this screaming child for 40 minutes before he settled down. I tried holding him while rocking, playing with toys to distract him from the pain, letting him stand because he loves it and playing with his hand puppet. Nothing was working. I took him into my bedroom and tried giving him the remote control to the TV because he loves it. The remote coupled with the empty tin container I found eventually got him settled down. That was actually his first drum experience!
My Mom came over and went with me to the pediatrician while my Step Dad installed the baby gate that my Mom had literally brought over THE DAY BEFORE! He snoozed on the way down there and had a good check up. Our doctor was very reassuring and I am forever grateful for that. He said if he had to pick a fall that he would prefer the stairs to falling straight down, like off of a bed. With the stairs you are breaking the momentum each time you come in contact with a new stair. With a straight fall you don’t.
Michael passed his exam beautifully. The doctor examined his eyes, throat and full body for any signs of injury without finding anything to be alarmed about. Thank goodness!! The bruise on his head wasn’t concerning because it wasn’t a hematoma. While we were there Michael was all sorts of happy while he was being examined and bouncing up and down on the table.
So Michael is to be monitored for the standard of 24 hours for any abnormal behavior and so far he is just crabby. He seems a little shaken up because he started to loose his balance while standing and was not happy at all about it! You could tell it wasn’t anything but being startled. I will have to check on him in 4 hour increments this evening just to make sure he stirs when I check on him.
I was impressed with the deal my Mom got on the baby gate! This gate was originally $68 at Meijer and it was marked down for $15! What a find! I come by my deal finding honestly because my Mom is pretty thrifty as well. You can see what type of gate I am talking about on Amazon.
This is a gate made especially for stairs because it connects to the wall, as you can see in the picture above. When we get to the point where we don’t need the gate then we can leave the wall mounts in and remove the door from them to store it. It is such a nice gate!
In the end Michael is acting pretty normal. Except he went down for a nap at 5:15 and it is 7:50 and is still sleeping!! That is going to wrench any sort of sleep I was planning on getting but I am to blame for him falling down the stairs so there isn’t much I can do about it.
I must say that I love my Mommy friends so much. I felt like a total schmuck today for letting this happen. It turns out that things like this DO HAPPEN and everyone seems to have a story they aren’t proud of. My Step Dad had one of his boys fall off of the changing table, my pediatrician had his daughter roll of of the bed (while sleeping) at 9 months and there were many more stories. I am forever grateful for their stories today because when something like this happens you feel like everyone is going to be mad at you, blame you or judge you.
**Update** Michael did just fine throughout the night, besides going to bed at 5:15 and waking up at 3:50 am!! I am exhausted already!
I didn’t know that the Advil advertised in the ad (buy $30 get $10) was the same at the Colgate $10 until the Ups printed out and said so. So I am going to do the Advil deal too! Buying the previous Colgate products has given me $2 towards my $30 total so that works in my favor. There is a limit of 4 deals on this one. It turned out that you only have to buy $25 and you will get a $10 UP reward!! That is way better than $30 even if you only do one rebate! I have my family members get the rebates and they just pay me the cash when the rebate comes.
