Have you ever almost done something horrible to your children?

In My Humble Opinion
1

There’s a thread in the Pit about the child left in Chuckie Cheese by her aunts. Reading it reminds me of a few things that I’ve done that if they went a different way would lead to me being pitted for being a horrible parent.

I was going to wash the car but wanted to put it on the lawn so the water would stay on the grass. I put my less than two year old son in the front seat with me but didn’t buckle him in because we only were going to drive about 5 feet at 1 mph. I was facing his direction and in a fraction of a second he opened the door and almost fell head first out of the car. His head was arranged in the perfect spot to be run over by the front wheel. If I hadn’t seen in time to grab his leg who knows what would have happened.

Same son, different incident. He was not yet two and his brother was in 1st grade. The 1st grader and he would go into the older one’s bedroom every day after school with the door shut for a while. One day the older boy came out of his room ALONE. OH NO! I frantically searched the house convinced the baby was trapped somewhere, suffocating. The neighbors came over to help and their son found him across the street on the back deck of the neighbor’s house. He was wearing only a diaper and shirt and socks and there was snow on the ground. I estimated he had been outside for around 20 minutes because the dog had been acting weird at the front door earlier and I kicked the dog out the back.

Same son (oh no) We were at my in-laws lakefront home watching them play in the sand. We decided to rake the beach while we watched. Both of us happened to look away from the water at the same time. We turned back and non swimming 1 yr old was treading water like crazy in water over his head. After that we strictly had a rule of not doing anything else while watching them swim.

What could have happened still haunts me.

Anyone else? Am I the only horrible parent?

2

Have you considered putting him in bubble wrap?

3

Really! He is a lucky boy. He’s 14 now. Once we realized he was an accident magnet we watched him like hawks.

4

I have turned my back on my older son a couple of times…

Bookstore - he is with me as I am paying. I grab the bag and he is gone. 5 minutes later found hiding under a stool.
Grocery store (small grocer). Same thing, I pay, turn - and he is gone. This time he was mad and had walked 3-4 stores down and sat down on a bench mad at me. The cops were already on their way.

I did drive him to the airport in Sweden on my wife’s lap. We did not have a car seat, had not needed one while there (we took the train when we arrived). A friend offered to drive us and as we were loading up we realized that we had nothing. Swedish highways, kid on the lap. Probably not a finer moment for us.

5

Not a good idea. You would just sit around all day popping him. :smiley:

6

I think most parents have had a moment of terror over a misplaced child. I remember not being able to find my daughter once at a large family party. She was not quite two at the time, I’d been distracted for a couple of minutes, and she was gone. After a quick check of the house, I was *sure * that she’d wandered either into the street or out of the backyard (into the swamp!) and I was completely panicked. Turns out that she’d peed her pants waiting for someone to come out of the bathroom, and was hiding in a closet because she was embarrassed.

7

We temporarily lost our 2+ year old at a night-time family yard party. It was a large group, kids everywhere, music, games and stuff going on. I was holding his younger sister and thought my husband was keeping an eye on the older one. Nope. He wandered about three blocks and was sitting on the curb of a highway watching the cars go by when we found him.

8

When my daughter was about 8 mos old I sat her on the counter at the post office while I was mailing some letters. She was stable and was leaning against me- honest! Half a heart beat later she took a header off the counter. I put up my knee so she bounced off of it before she hit the ground, sigh.

I once forgot to sunblock my toddler son and he got a nifty burn.

My husband once dropped our newborn daughter. I had nursed her and passed her off to my husband who would rock her to sleep. He was sitting up in bed and fell asleep. relaxed his arms and she fell to the floor. He told everyone over the next couple of days as penance.

9

Last year. They were never in any danger but my wife and I didn’t know that at the time.

My wife’s Jewish and I’m not. Last year we joined a temple right before High Holy Days. My wife likes to sing and joined the temple choir. This caused a bit of a problem, though. Since she was singing she’d be busy during the services. But since I wasn’t raised as a Jew, I was uncomfortable attending alone. (What if did the wrong thing? And embarrassed myself at the new temple! Ahh!) But the kids had started temple school the previous month, so we wanted them to be take part in the kids program. What to do?

Here was the plan: Since my wife had to be there early for the choir she’d go first. Then about an hour later I’d take the kids and drop them off at the kid’s program. Then when the services were over my wife would collect them and come home. My wife even gave me directions so I would know exactly where to take them in the building. Simple.

Except for one little detail. High Holy Days are very popular. So popular that the entire congregation can’t fit into the entire temple at once for the main services. So, our congregation, like many, rents a hall in a nearby hotel so there will be room for everyone. Some events are held at the temple, and others at the hotel.

My wife had gone off to sing without telling me whether that day’s program was at the temple or the hotel! I’d only been in the temple once so even the fact that I had directions for which room to go to wasn’t much of a help.

But, aha, I had an idea! The temple was on THE WAY to the hotel. If I drove past and saw lots of cars at the temple, I’d know that’s where the services were being held. But if the temple was deserted, I’d go on to the hotel.

Sure enough, the temple was packed. Crisis averted. As we walked in I could even hear the choir singing. I followed the directions down to the room where the kids’ program was being held, signed them in and headed home.

A couple of hours later I get a frantic call from my wife: “Where are the kids?”

“I dropped them off downstairs. Signed them in and everything.”

“They can’t find them! They’re missing!”

It actually took us about five minutes of frantic theorizing back and forth (with my wife acting as go-between between me and the people running the children’s program) before my wife mentioned one crucial piece of information: SHE WAS AT THE HOTEL.

It turned out that what our congregation was renting the hotel for our High Holy Days services, a smaller congregation was renting our temple for theirs. And that’s who I’d left our kids with!

We both raced over to the temple and arrived almost simultaneously. The kids were safe and sound, eating some challah with a group of very amused adults who figured that we’d show up sooner or later. The kids had had a great time and were kind of baffled at how upset we were.

The weird thing was how my wife’s directions synched up between the two buildings. If they hadn’t matched I probably would have figured out something was wrong sooner … .

Of course our entire congregation found out about the crazy gentile dad who dropped his kids off at the wrong building for High Holy Days, so I managed to embarass myself far more thoroughly than if I’d just gone to services in the first place. This year my wife skipped being in the choir (much to the cantor’s dismay) so we could all go to services as a family. My kids asked if they could go back to the temple again, but we assured them that the program at the hotel would be fun too. And I only got teased a little bit.

10

I don’t have kids, but after reading this blog post and the resulting comments earlier tonight, I was actually coming here to start this very thread.

Am I a horrible person for finding most of the stories in that link hysterically funny? I cringe too, mind you, but I laugh while I’m doing it.

11

A couple of hours ago I killed several million of my children. :stuck_out_tongue:

12

Not “done” but “let happen”… when Moon Unit was about 4, I was sitting on the front steps of our townhouse, as she played with a group of kids about 5 doors down the street - maybe 100 feet away. I was looking around, and when I looked back at the group of kids, realized I couldn’t see her. She’d been appearing and disappearing among the kids all along so had probably been gone for a few minutes at that point.

Ran inside, woke my spouse who was snoozing, and he took off running around the neighborhood. Our neighborhood backs up to another one, with a pond :eek: . I called the police to let them know.

15 minutes later, while my husband was still out looking, a police car pulled up and disgorged not only 4-year-old Moon Unit, but the neighbor’s 3-year-old son. The policeman was driving to our neighborhood and turned onto the far end of the street (it was a loop that connected to the main road at both ends; we lived near the north end, the policeman was at the south end) where he saw a woman talking to 2 young children. She had seen them about to cross from the townhouse neighborhood, to go to the apartment complex nearby, and prevented them from crossing.

Moon Unit’s explanation? She wanted to go to the playground at the apartment complex! :smack: We’ve since joked that even at age 4 she was leading younger men astray!

There was the time when Dweezil was about 6 months old, when I was at my mother’s house. I walked out of the house with him in my arms, to go run some errands, and landed funny on my foot and sprained my ankle. Somehow I managed to grab the house wall and not fall. Had I fallen, I’d have landed with him (possibly on him) on concrete / flagsones or maybe just on the jagged brick stuff edging the flowerbed, or maybe just on the asphalt. The results would not have been good. Somehow I got back into the house and broke down in complete hysterics.

13

My daughter fell out of my bed when I left her sleeping there - and I knew better but she had been sleeping so soundly.

When I heard the bang she was tipped off the bed, face down. I was so panicked.

She was fine but the resulting guilt was added to the pile.

14

No, but there’s still time. :smiley:

15

I sat my daughter (then aged 12 months) on the bench beside where I was doing the dishes, since she liked to be a part of everything I was doing. I don’t know how long it was, but at some point I realised that she wasn’t sitting there anymore.
Heart stopping moment - without a sound she had disappeared from within arm’s length!
Surely, I would look over the end of the bench and see her unconcious or worse on the floor…
She’d shuffled herself to the end of the bench and dropped off, (unable to walk, she’d landed on her feet with bent knees and absorbed the shock). She was happily sitting on the floor, playing with her toes.

Oh and a couple of years later, she outran me into moderate surf. By the time I caught up with her, she’d been out of sight for about half a minute (felt like years!) I can still see her faintly surprised look as I pulled her up from half a metre below the water’s surface. I had been tidying the beach blanket before my parents joined us for a picnic, that’s how she got the lead on me.

I do the most horrible things every day according to her, I call them breakfast lunch and dinner. :smiley:

16

I don’t have kids but when I was six or seven, I taught my dad to never leave the engine running and kids in the car if he wasn’t there. Why? Because they’ll change the gearshift from park to reverse and the car will roll down the slanty driveway and into the street with 2 screaming kids at 8 in the morning. Boy did Dad tear out of the house in a hurry.
By the way, if I may jump topics for a moment, this recollecting has made me realize how faulty memories can be. I distinctly remember shooting backwards down the driveway and way down the street. But armored, as I am now, with basic knowledge of the gas and brake pedals I know for a fact that the car could not have been going much faster than an idle. Still freaked me out as a kid though.

17

When my aunt’s oldest child was about a year old, I wanted of picture of their family.
They had just gotten a new car, so the sat the baby on the hood, with mom and dad on either side of him.
They each thought the other had a hand on the baby, but neither did.
He took a header on the the gravel driveway just after I clicked the picture. He still has a scar on his chin.

18

A few months ago… my son was about 12 months old…

I wake up in the afternoons because I work nights. My wife comes in when its time to wake me up and puts the boy on the bed to wake me up. She then usually climbs in and he plays on the bed while we chat for a few minutes.

Well, he likes (liked I should say) to crawl to the bottom of the bed, pull himself up on the bedframe, and then toss himself backwards onto the bed itself.

Well, Wee Man is down there playing… when we hear a loud THUNK… I look down at the bottom of the bed. No baby.

I leap out of bed, and bolt down… and he’s laying on a pile of laundry we had accumulated at the foot of our bed.

He had managed to overturn himself over the foot of the bed, landed on a chest we have there, and then roll off onto the pile of laundry.

He was actually laughing.

He is no longer allowed to the bottom of the bed.

19

Geez, after four kids such a question is sorta moot innit? How many examples do you want? I’ve got plenty! :smiley:

The time four days after giving birth to Kid#2 when I needed to go shopping…strapped Kid#1 into her booster seat, got out of the driveway and 4km down the road before I remembered that I had another kid at home, alone in his cot!! :smack:

When Kid#4 was a little tacker (about 2) he had an attack of croup one morning. He was drowsy so I put him on the couch with his doona and teddy to sleep, and put a big pot of boiling water under a table nearby to act as an humidifier. I made sure he was fully asleep, then went back to the kitchen to clean some stuff up when I heard a scream…he’d woken and moved the table away from the sofa, and put his foot RIGHT DAB IN THE BOILING WATER. :rolleyes: He’s still scarred on that foot (he’s 19 now) but claims it as a ‘battle injury’ to enquiring girlfriends. :smiley:

Kid#2 when aged about 4yrs old decided one morning that he would crawl everywhere rather than walk. Perhaps in response to the birth of another little brother, I thought it was just ‘regressive’ behaviour and thus psychological in origin. So I took the mickey outta him…told him he was being just like a baby himself and being quite pathetic really, if the truth be told!! When by lunchtime he still wasn’t walking, I realised that the problem might have been medical rather than just a simple neurosis, and scooted him off to the doctor who scooted him off to the hospital ASAP with suspected Perthes Disease. :smack: After five days as an inpatient, it was found not to be Perthes, but a ‘viral’ infection of the hip joint, just as painful but with less long-term damage thankfully. He too has since fully recovered and is a healthy 23 yr old.

The time/s I have hung too much shopping off’ve the back of the stroller containing a kid and it has flipped backwards banging said kids head/s on the concrete sidewalk?

All the times I never sterilised their bottles?

The time that one got so sunburned that strangers threatened to report me to the Child Welfare Agency?

Ah shit, this sounds like a confessional booth!! They’re all healthy adults now. Despite all of the ‘accidents’ I musta done something right!

:wink:

20

When my son was a young toddler he had a bad cough that he ended up getting an inhaler for. The doctor called it an asthma-like cough. Several months later he got another cough that got worse and worse in a fairly quick amount of time. So much so that he was too weak to walk in from the car, so much so that his little chest was heaving and all he could do was lie around on the sofa. Now I was aware that there was an inhaler somewhere in the house but it never occured to me to give it to him! It was for that other illness! So we called the on-call doctor and waited around for him to call, the whole time my son was struggling for breath. And my husband wasn’t acting all that concerned so I thought I was just being overly protective. I was heading for the phone to call 911 when the doctor called back and yelled at me for not giving him the inhaler. When I told my little guy that I was going to give him the inhaler he asked “Will it feel me better?” So pitiful. But it did feel him better, thank goodness. I just wish something would feel me better regarding the ptsd that I have about almost letting my only child die from an asthma attack. I was crying about it last night and it’s almost 7 years ago that this happened.