How accidents happen

I put my daughter in her car seat. While putting my kids in their car seats, I do my best to solely focus on the task at hand. Too often have I read these horror stories about mom's getting busy and forgetting to buckle them in all the way. They make a sudden stop and some kid goes flying into a windshield (etc. etc.). So, to combat the potential flight of my kids, I make sure I am gung-ho on the fastening.

Meanwhile, my mother in law is holding my son and remembers she needs to go get her purse. She walks back under the covered porch and through the chainlink latch gate to go do that. I'm still sticking my daughter in the car in the meanwhile. A few moments later I hear my mother in law shout my son's name with extreme sharpness. I look over and there he is, 30 feet away from us running at full speed towards the street and I see my mother in law take off into a sprint towards him.

What happened?

You see, this is why mothers have a hard time with others watching their children. It's not that we are crazy psychopaths that hoard our precious children like Gollum's precious ring. We know our kids inside and out and do not expect others to have the same radar. Almost any mother can tell you that the majority of their child's near-death experiences have occurred outside her care. Our husbands, mothers, friends, babysitters are all competent people, they just screw up more than us because they are not used to being mentally committed to the current child task at hand.

When I go into a store, I may be looking at something on the rack but it is with only 2% of my brain. The other 98% is processing what each child is doing at that moment, whether they'll be hungry soon, the creepy looking lady in the parking lot who looked like she wanted them, the probability of a dirty diaper based upon what they ate for lunch and last time pooped and the fastest way out of the store should a melt down occur.

That is why I get so upset when I am focusing all my attention on my daughter and my son is heading towards a street to potentially become road kill. I trusted another human being with his care and got let down.

She had set him down on the ground and watched him run off towards the toys in the backyard. During the couple of seconds it took her to duck into the house and grab her purse, he changed direction and ran towards the backyard gate that she had accidently left open. He charged out the gate, whizzed behind me, and headed out to splat land.

Luckily or should I say, thanks to angels, she came out of the house and heard him running down the drive way (I didn't hear because the car was on). She was able to chase him down and grab him about 3 feet from the asphalt. We both played it off like it was no big deal, everyone's ok, but my heart is still trying to calm down, hours later.