Showing posts with label SIDS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SIDS. Show all posts

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Staying alive


After little guy hit his first birthday, more than one person said to me, “Congratulations – you have made it for a whole year without killing your baby!” I thought it too. On Friday morning, I mused, “how bad of mothers could we be, he’s still alive.” In fact, I think keeping your baby alive is one of the main skill sets of being a mom. And it’s not a sure thing either.

It starts in your pregnancy when you start reading those “What to expect books”. They should really be called, “Everything that could possibly go wrong.” I used to be a girl who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and could stay up for days at a time doing shots. Suddenly, I was terrified of brie.

Once the baby is born, there is the scariest of all possibilities – SIDS. You make it past the first six months, and you feel a little bit better. Maybe you don't have to check their breathing every ten minutes. Then they start moving around, and the potential for fatal accidents is increased. It took a long time to get it through my head that my little guy has no reasoning abilities. I thought he would stop crawling at the edge of a bed, because obviously there was no bed there. There have been a few trips to the doctors.

So through luck, wisdom and a hard head, we are all still alive. I am grateful.


It is getting harder to take pictures of him, because as soon as he sees the camera, he tries to grab it.


But what’s more fun than a camera? A stove, of course.