Why do you find this so unbelievable?
I probably misunderstood the OP, but I read it as an incestuous situation involving OP, his wife, and his BIL.
You do realize that when these children are in the car, the parent would swear on a stack of bibles, and pass every lie detector imaginable, that the kid is safely at daycare/gramma’s/home. It’s not that the other thing (purse, cellphone) is more important, it’s that you’re not likely to forget them. So the one time in your life you forget the kid is asleep in his carseat, you ALSO have to forget your purse at the exact same time.
To the OP, if you or your wife aren’t comfortable with a ridiculous “watch my child” request, you need to say NO. It’s not OK to say YES, then amble around for who knows how long before going to check on the infant. Especially when your BIL is a fucking moron who doesn’t even have a crib. WTF is that, get a goddamn pack and play for $50. People give that shit away all the time once their kids grow out of them.
This has been linked before, but everyone who talks sanctimoniously about kids in cars really needs to read this article: Fatal Distraction
Like so many other things in life, if you say “it can’t happen to me” you’re missing out on a chance for self-reflection and consideration of a real and possible risk.
It sounds like the dad is completely clueless about his son’s moving abilities. A baby doesn’t need to crawl to do what grude describes - just roll. Which is a 3-month skill, generally.
I have to concur with Cheesesteak though - you really should have said no OR gone to check up on the kid straight away once you were taking responsibility. I know it’s natural to assume if BIL says the kid’s asleep he’s probably in some safe place and fine but … well, now you know that ain’t the case. Chalk it up to experience and be glad nothing really bad happened this time.
Good thing you were around…
“You are likely to be saved by a grude.”
The baby very well might not have crawled yesterday. That’s the thing about babies, they’re learning new shit all the time. And isn’t this sort of thing why you’re not supposed to give babies covers or pillows or any other loose bedding, because of the risk of just this sort of thing happening? I’ve never been around an infant for more than a few hours at a stretch, and even I know that.
You weren’t paying proper attention. The first rule of Parent Club is “Don’t talk about killing the kid.”
Yeah, this seriously made me go WTF? Rolling the width of a bed should be a trivial task for a six month old. And onto a tile floor, nonetheless. Nice. Was dad dropped on his head as a child, too, perhaps?
I kind of think the person, who may have saved this baby, was the woman who said, “Go fetch that baby!”, recognizing she couldn’t see it, like she needed to. Knowing, as a Mom, her eyes have not been on the baby for XXX minutes. Not that grude isn’t all kinds of awesome for his actions!
At the very least, I would insist this family acquire the correct sort of bed for their child. So that when they can step away, for a moment it can be without fear of this ever, ever happening again!
I don’t understand this story at all. Why didn’t the baby’s father drop the baby off with the OP before leaving for work?
(Am I right in thinking that “downstairs” means a separate apartment and not a lower floor in the same house?)
That article made me cry. As a mother, I can put myself in that position and I know that the guilt would probably kill me.
Oh as as for your b-i-l grude, he should have brought the baby up to you or the baby should have been in a crib. I would be incensed at him. Imagine your guilt if you hadn’t found him?
I was hoping someone would post this - it’s often linked to when this thing comes up but I would not have been able to find it. Anyone who thinks they need to be judgmental about those parents needs to STFU and read that article!
I sat and read that article when it was published, and cried and cried. Gene Weingarten wrote that with incredible compassion, and it changed my perspective forever. I can’t imagine how it affected him as a writer - to really get inside the grief and pain those people felt. I don’t know if I’d have had the fortitude.
Who the fuck knows? The OP raises more questions than it answers.
Is BIL living with them? Why? Where is the child’s mother? Why is the room locked? Does the baby have a crib? Why not? Where does the baby normally sleep? Who was supposed to watch the baby the rest of the day when BIL goes off to work?
Honestly, it sounds like an accident on the part of the brother-in-law. Had the child died, it would have been a tragic accident, but fortunately that didn’t happen. I’m not saying he wasn’t wrong, but I don’t think it’s uncommon to have near-misses in childrearing, even at this level of seriousness. Saying he’s an unfit parent because he’s not fully aware of the dangers of loose sheets or how much babies can move is a bit harsh.
I agree about the come-to-Jesus talk, but be careful how you broach the subject. “You almost killed your child” can get met with a wall of denial. “Your child was nearly dead when I found him this morning” is a bit more sobering.
Ah, yes, some Puerto Rican guy. Shifty, he is.
I’m not a parent, but it doesn’t sound like normal parental behavior to leave an infant all alone in a locked apartment, no matter what kind of surface they’re sleeping on. This seems like more than just “oops, I didn’t know that loose sheets were bad” to me. Why didn’t he just bring the kid upstairs when he was going up anyways?
He probably locked the door out of habit and / or to protect the child. That seems sensible if someone nearby has keys. He probably assumed that if the kid slept on his own just fine at night, he’d sleep on his own just fine during the day—and of course this same accident could have happened in the middle of the night while the parents were asleep upstairs. Even if they were checking on him every fifteen minutes, that’s more than enough time for the child to have died if they didn’t hear him fall.
What the parent did wrong was a combination of factors, but it mostly boils down to the presence of a sheet that the baby could strangle itself with. That’s easily correctable ignorance, and not a reason to take a child away from someone. I’d maybe buy him a baby monitor, as well: being able to hear the thunk would have made some difference, too.
ETA: I’m not advocating leaving babies alone in locked houses, of course. I’m just saying that that particular error in judgement wasn’t the issue here.