Top 5 Near Misses

I feel like in my parenting life I've become an expert at "The Near Miss." And I worry sometimes that I've used up all of my close calls and the next thing that happens is going to be the real thing.

I thought I would make up a list of the near misses as a reminder to hug my kids tight and be thankful that they're still in one piece.

I don't think it's a coincidence that none of these happened when I was a new mom with only one child.

1. Quarter Past an Epiglottis, May 2008

Milo comes running up to me, crying. "I swallowed a penny." I freeze with no idea what to do. The penny isn't blocking his airway since he's speaking clearly and crying. He gags. He pukes. Out comes his lunch and a quarter. Either he doesn't know the difference between a quarter and a penny or he's a money-making machine. For future reference, the doctor tells us that if a quarter goes all the way down, we simply have to wait for it to pass.

2. Rolling Thunder, June 2005

My father is carrying Huck up the brick stairs in his car seat carrier. Having just gone for a ride in the stroller, Huck is not strapped in. The handle of the carrier is also not in the full upright position. Huck rolls out of the carrier and down the four stairs. After we spend the evening in ithe emergency room the doctors assure us that everything is OK and Huck received only a "glancing blow." The entire event causes a lot more pain to my father than to Huck.

3. On Pins and Needles, July 2006

We are staying with Marco's parents in Montana and we've set the boys up in porta cribs in their laundry room. I go to retrieve them after a nap and find that Milo's crib is full of straight pins. You read that right. Its full of straight pins. He's somehow managed to push the crib over to a drawer and pull out his grandmother's box of pins. Not only has he not swallowed one of them, he doesn't have a pin prick on him. He did not, however, manage to teach himself how to sew. 

3. Scar Face, February 2008

Milo is playing with a screw driver and gives Huck a giant hug. The screw driver scrapes the side of Huck's face, only narrowly missing his eye. There's still a scar and all of the kids' future careers as carpenters are over, as all screw drivers are now banned from the house.

4. The Easiest Way to Learn Not to Play Underneath the Car, January 2008

Marco has just returned home from work and the kids run out to greet him. As soon as Marco turns the car off, Huck decides that it would be hilarious if he crawled under it. Before we can tell him not to, we hear him howl. When he climbs out he is clutching his back. He's burned himself on the exhaust pipe, that's very, very, hot. He still has the scar on his back and our only consolation is that there are much, much harder ways to learn how dangerous it is to crawl under the car.

5. Sticker Shock, November 2005

It's just a regular day in the Morrone household when all of the sudden Huck starts to make a strange, cat-gagging-on-a-furball noise. We peer into his mouth and find a round black sticker stuck to the roof. We peel it off and wonder what it is. It's a day later when we notice that one of the black circle stickers that Annabella used for her construction paper turkey's eye is missing. We marvel at Huck's dexterity at such a young age.

Care to share your near misses?

Comments

[Tony Meyer]

Interesting that not one of these was Annabella. Is it boys? Twins? Luck?

These stories are a little terrifying (in 21 months, we haven't had anything like these, and surely everyone does eventually).

[Leah]

When my son was about 3 months old, I put him on my bed, strapped on the Snugli, and then lifted him up really high to drop him feet first in the Snugli. I forgot that the ceiling fan was on overhead, and I stuck his head right into the fan, which was ON!

After a panicked call to his doctor, who told me to feel his head and see if it felt *crunchy*, the baby was fine. I have never recovered, however, and the Snugli was thrown away, never to be used again.

His older sister once was found sucking on the couch cushions, right after we had cleaned them with cleaning fluid - they were still wet and she was sucking out the liquid. Poison control was on speed dial then - luckily we haven't had to call in a while.

We've had two fall-down-the-stairs incidents with our son, both of which were dramatic, head over heels, nearly landed on his head type things, and one fall-out-of-the-swing-while-at-the-highest-point -of-the-arc incident with our daughter, who landed on her shoulder, and jumped up crying, "I need to go to the hospital!" She didn't.

Our kids are six and nine now, and we haven't had a close call in a while, we're probably due.

[attiton]

"He did not, however, manage to teach himself how to sew."

I can also share my most vivid near miss. One day, when Rabbit was maybe 8 weeks old, I decided that I had to get my PPD-scarred behind out into the world. So, I strapped my daughter into the Baby Bjorn, facing me and on my chest, and headed out. I did not make it a block down the street when I tripped and fell...face forward, of course.

My mommy-brain took over and I somehow spun clumsily through the air as I plummeted heavily to the ground, taking the full force of my body onto the back of my right hand, which I then used to hurl myself onto my back before landing with an oomph and a thud.

Rabbit cried, but apparently more from the sudden movement than from any injury. I frantically searched her body for any sign of blood or anything...nothing to be found. I, however, had a skinned knee (um, that hasn't happened since I was, say, eight) and a series of wounds on the back of my right hand, the scars from which I look at all day while I type.

I replay this scene in my mind almost weekly to this day.

[Speedmaster]

Yikes! That's some scary business. ;-)

Our kids are 11, 10, and 6. Too many near misses to count. But I do remember when the oldest girl was 2. She tripped and hit her head on the edge of the coffee table ... right to the bone and just barely over the eye, emergency room, strapped to a board, stitches, crying for mom. Something you don't soon forget. ;-(

[Erin]

My parents had been visiting and had left to return to Virginia. My kiddo, about a year, is out of my sight for a grand total of 10 seconds. I find her with a white tablet in her mouth. AAARRRGGGHHH! I pluck it out and it turns to mush, leaving me no way to identify to Poison Control what it could have been. It turns out, my dad had dropped a tylenol on the floor and never found it. Leave it to Dectective Kiddo, PI.

[David Braziel]

We sat (like lazy parents) on the sofa and asked our eight year old to run into the kitchen and fetch the newspaper. He shot off at top speed, we heard a thump, a nasty cracking noise then silence then more running then some sobbing - I shout "what have you done" and our son shouts back that he banged into the banister. then he walks in holding his hand over his eye with blood pouring out between his fingers.

After frantic investigation we find that he has a deep cut right in the eyebrow that requires a couple of stitches. The thing is he cracked his head off the wooden post at the bottom of the stairs which had about four coats hanging over it. What damage he would have done without that padding I shudder to think.

[David Braziel]

Oh god, once you start remembering these its like flashbacks. I can vividly picture our five year old son standing proudly at the top of a pyramid climbing frame shouting "Daddy Look" before falling backwards and tumbling head over heels about 10 feet onto the floor. Shaken but otherwise unharmed.

Then the time I slammed the car boot (trunk) and my son had his fingers over the edge of it. He froze, my heart stopped as I yelled at him to stay still while I fumbled the keys to open the boot and release his fingers. I expected to find a mangled mess or four severed finger ends lying in a pool of blood. In fact he was unharmed apart from a slight crease where the lip of the boot had held him - but another few millimeters and ....

[MissM]

First of all, *sigh* flashback city for me. My sons are 16 and 13, The FIRST day the youngest one had roller blades (yeah, I bought em. why???) he fell and hurt his wrist, but it didn't swell, or bruise, but he was still having pain 2 days!?!?!?!? later. I took him to the ER and he had fractured his wrist bone, but because he was so young it had creased instead of cracked. Which meant a cast for only a couple weeks. I felt soo guilty for waiting 2 days.
Our first trip to the ER is when the same child, when he was less than 2 years old, he put the fluoride pill up his nose, instead of chewing it. They never did find it, but rinsed out his sinuses.
That's the top 2 :)
Thanks for sharing Megan. I think ;)
Love the show

[Yoann]

My son, 10 month old, is sitting on the floor in the living room, playing with his toys. I'm sitting on the couch, watching TV, absently watching him. Then I hear him cough. I watch him, he has kind of watery eyes, but breaths normaly and stops coughing and starts playing again. Oh well, maybe he found some wierd thing, like Cat hair or something and ate it. He coughs a bit more in the next few minutes, but everything goes ok.

Then, 10 minutes later, I take him with me to the computer, sit him on the floor while I type something. I hear him cough again, look at him, and he has a Coke Bottle Cap in his mouth (2L bottle, the cap...!)­. What the?? I take it out of his mouth, it barely fit in here!! Did he just took it from the floor and coughed? Or did he ... take it.... earlier??? It's so big it makes nearly no sense, but it still scares me now and I always make sure there's nothing in reach for miles around him... sigh!

[ScouterM]

Scary stuff, luckily we haven'e experienced anything as scary so far with our son who is now almost 5 (in fact we have had no ER room visits to this date, though by typing this I have probably jinxed us). Our strangest incident involved two rare earth magnets which we have to hold large objects onto the fridge (they are extremely strong magnets). Our son (who had just turned 4)had taken to playing with these magnets in addition to the Leapfrog Word Whammer. I showed my son just how strong they were by showing them how they attracted each other from either side of my nose (which I now know was foolish), and he then proceeded to try to get them to stick across other parts of his body. Later in the day I was working on the computer and my son was playing downstairs. He comes into my office and says "there's a hole in my mouth and it's distracting my tongue". Confused I start to look into his mouth and don't intially see anything. I ask him to point to the hole and he points to his front tooth, which I then notice has a big pieve broken off of it. Shocked I ask what happened and he tells me that he tried to put the magents (see the connection now) onto his teeth, but they snapped together so hard it broke a piece of his tooth off. Of course it is also a holiday and I start to imagine emergency dental costs, but other than "distracting his tongue" it didn't expose a nerve or create any sensitivity (tested with ice cream and very cold water), so we wait until the next day to take him to the dentist. The dentist isn't too concerned as he has broken a baby tooth, but grinds and polishes down the broken edge (no charge even) while telling us he has never heard of a magnet accident before. I however will continue to see that broken tooth until at least it falls out.

[OverDad]

I'm trying hard not to remember mine, ugh, yours scared me enough for one day! It's amazing what kids live through.

[coach outlet]

it's a good post, i like it so much, and i look forward to your next wonderful article.