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.

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