Thursday, August 5, 2010

The Baby Heard Round The Kitchen

I got quite the scare this afternoon. Fortunately, someone out there is watching out for me and baby Iain.

In an effort to use the food we get each week from our community farm share, I've been trying to cook more. My cooking friend Sarah sent me a few recipes to try to help use up the items I don't typically cook with like beats and cucumbers. I cooked the beats to use in a salad tomorrow and then chopped up the cucumbers for a basic cucumber salad. Easy enough. While I was cooking and had the over still hot from the beats, I also thought it would be nice to make some oatmeal chocolate chip cookies to keep in the freezer for a little snack every now and then. Have I mentioned that I'm a chocoholic? Well, I am. And I thought the cookies would reduce the number I handfuls of chocolate chips I eat each afternoon when I need a snack.

So here I was, in the kitchen making cookies, dancing to some music to get in some cardio for the day, with Iain in the bouncy seat happy as can be. I can be an insane multi-tasker and it just so happened that I was also emptying the dishwasher as I was dancing, making cookies, and watching Iain. That's normal, right?

As I emptied the dishwasher, I was trying to put the blender away in a high cabinet that is poorly organized and contains a mini food processor, parts to a stick blender, and a small food chopper. I've always hated the contents of this cabinet and how something always got dislodged whenever I opened it, further frustrating me and causing me to hate the cabinet even more. I had recently purged half it's contents to make it less ominous, giving away a few small kitchen appliances that just didn't fit in our house and could be put to better use by someone with a better space to store them. Too bad that didn't help me today.

There I was, reaching up to try to shove the base of the blender back into the corner of the cabinet when the cabinet's contents starting tumbling out at me. I, as instinct, jumped back so that the blender parts and other random small appliance accessories could fall unobstructed --just to watch them hit baby Iain in the head on their way to the ground since I had stupidly placed his bouncy seat right below that cabinet.

First, my heart skipped a beat. Then it sped up rapidly as I watched the stick blender whisk attachment hit him first. And then I'm pretty sure that the blender blade for the chopper hit him next. It all happened so fast that I just remember thinking, "Please dear God don't let whatever just fell on Iain have injured his eyes." I'm not sure how I could deal with myself if something so stupid had caused him to be blind or leave him permanently scarred in some way. Luckily, the way these objects impacted him caused very minimal damage. I was relieved when I saw just the smallest cut form on his forehead between his eyebrows. How often do you hear that? I, the parent of a newborn, was relieved to see blood on his forehead!

He, on the other hand, was not so relieved. He was in fact pissed off to the extreme. The screams he let out could tear a mother's heart in two. It was awful. I instantly cuddled him, shushing his cries as we bounced and rocked and swayed down the hallway to the living room. I think I started breathing again once we got to the couch. He screamed. I nursed him and tried to put an ice pack on his head to reduce the swelling but he wanted nothing to do with that so I gave up. He just wanted to be soothed and a cold foreign object on your head after a trauma like that doesn't really set well with him. Luckily, it turned out that it didn't even swell or bleed for that matter. But it did take a good five minutes for him to settle down again and even then he was still pretty jumpy. I know I spent the duration of his crying spell thinking how lucky we are, how much I love this little guy, how important it is for me to think more about my actions and how they might affect him, and how much I really need to slow down and reduce my multi-tasking so that I don't miss out on life by trying to do too much.

Moral of the story: When something happens to your child, don't panic. Breathe. Hope for the best. Stay calm and deal with the situation you've been dealt with as best you can.

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