Adventures in Parenting

Remember the movie, Adventures in Babysitting?  It's classic 80's although I think the version I first saw was some edited one as the last time I saw it, I was amazed at some of the content.  Anyway, the general jist is that a teenage girl ends up taking a babysitting job in the suburbs, gets a desperate phone call from her best friend who is stranded at some bus station in the inner city, packs up the kids in the station wagon and heads towards the city for a crazy night filled with a tire blow out, a scary truck driver with a hook for a hand, a car heist, a gang fight, and a 7 year old who is obsessed with the super hero, Thor.

Thus far, I have had no such craziness in my adventures in parenting.  No stitches, no ER visits, not even vomit.  (Plenty of parasite poop but no vomit.)

Tonight was an awfully close call though.

Our hundred year old house has a floor grate that is in the floor of our upstairs bathroom which means it is also on the ceiling of the room directly below it:  our kitchen.  The floor grate is the heavy metal kind, about 8 inches by 12 inches in size and is useful for helping to heat the upstairs or for two kid yelling back and forth while one of them is using the bathroom.

Hole in ceiling from where the grate used to be

As I was slicing oven fries, Conleigh was upstairs using the bathroom.  A penny flew through the grate.  I yelled upstairs to Conleigh about it, and she of course told me that the money was upstairs and needed to go downstairs with logic that only a 4 year old can manage.  (ie how else would I expect the money to get downstairs other than going through a grate?  Walking it downstairs is not a viable solution.)

A few second later I hear a loud thud, look and realize that my daughter is dangling from the grate.  She had taken off the grate from the bathroom upstairs and tried to stand on the second grate that covered the hole in the kitchen ceiling.  The 4 screws from grate cover from the kitchen ceiling could not support her weight and fell to the floor, hence the thud.  She caught herself with her arms as she fell so as I look up, I see two legs and two strong little arms holding onto the bathroom floor for dear life.

I told her to not move and ran towards the stairs trying to get through the dining room, entry, and up the stairs into the bathroom.  In doing so, while running across the tile in the entry, I hit a patch of water that the dog dribbled out of his bowl and slide across the floor, into the bottom stair.  At this point, I'm crying because I think I may have broken my toe and because I'm a little scared about Conleigh.

By the time I get to the bathroom, she has pulled herself out of the grate hole and is starting to stand up on the floor.  Kenson was in the kitchen and saw all of this and is now bawling at the top of his lungs.  I'm still crying crying and am now worried that I have not broken just one toe but instead three.  Conleigh is pretty shell shocked.

I sit Conleigh on the couch and decide that maybe a conversation with the panicked brother will be better than a conversation with me.  I calm Kenson down and have him share why he is crying.  He tells her he was very scared she was going to fall through that big deep hole.  I tell her that I am crying because I hurt my toe.  Then we cover the standard "don't you ever do that again!"

I head back to the kitchen to cut up the potatoes because if I don't get the oven fries going, we will have nothing to eat for supper.  As I'm cutting, Conleigh starts whimpering a little about her bottom hurting.  I check and she has a pretty good section of scrapes, nothing deep just scratches.  My foot is worse than her bottom so I tell her once I'm done with the potatoes, we'll get medicine.   After the potatoes get done and I find some ibufrofen for myself, I give her a bit of Neosporin and hope the thought of medicine makes it better.  As I'm doing so, Conleigh keeps looking up at our 9 foot ceilings with big eyes.  I could tell she was gauging how tall they were and how badly it might have hurt if she fell.  Her eyes keep filling up with tears and as I sat down to try to ice my toe, she crawled up with me and tells me how she hates that I got hurt and she hates that she fell.  My sweet Kenson passed on the monkey he was holding and tried to make her feel better.   (Probably the best part of the whole ordeal...seeing both of them show love for someone who was hurt.)

Now I know you are all enjoying this story and smiling while thinking "that's kind of funny."  However, I have probably not even shared the best part of this story, something only those of you with toddlers/preschoolers will understand.

Remember how I said that she was using the bathroom when all of this happened?

Here's the kicker:  this all happened with her underwear around her ankles and without the benefit of toilet paper.

Yes.

Yes indeed-she had gone number two, stopped to admire the grate, and gotten distracted before she had a chance to wipe and pull up her pants.  Only a 4 year old could pull off that little gem, only a 4 year old.