Wednesday, September 21, 2011

the trouble with loving little girls...


when my fourth born came along, my daughter had just turned four. she was so excited to have a new baby in the house and she could not get enough of her little brother. she got in trouble more than once for trying to pick him up or hold him on her own. we had to watch her like a hawk. it was such a relief each day when she left for preschool and i had three hours of worry free baby time.


we thought we had her under control and then she managed to surprise us all. at about two o'clock in the morning when the baby was two weeks old, i woke from my short amount of slumber to a strange sound. in my grogginess, i woke my husband and asked him if he'd heard anything. i told him it sounded like the baby was choking. he was closest to our bedroom door and hopped up to see if the baby was okay.



as soon as he hit the hallway, he headed not for our baby's room, but toward our daughter's room. her light was strangely on and he assumed that the sound i heard must have been her. he walked toward her room and saw her sitting up on her bed playing with a doll. "it's time for bed. put the doll away and go back to sleep." it was at this moment that the doll started moving and my husband discovered that it wasn't a doll she was playing with but our two week old son.



somehow she had woken up in the middle of the night, walked down to the baby's room, climbed into his crib where she grabbed him in a choke hold (thus the choking sounds), slung him over the side of the crib as she climbed out and down, carried him to her bedroom, put him on her bed and was in the process of undressing him so that she could put her doll clothes on him. awesome. never in the course of all the mommy stories that i've heard had anyone mentioned kidnapping in the middle of the night. whose kid does that?



we quickly got the baby back in his bed and put my daughter back to sleep. we locked the nursery door and kept a screwdriver on the door frame well out of four year old reach. so far we've had nothing as horrible in comparison. before i had my youngest, everyone told me what a helper my little girl would be. boy were they wrong. there is such a thing as too much of a mommy instinct.



how about you? any child stealing horrors? can anyone top this? i'd love for once to not be the measure of horror that everyone else checks and then feels good about in comparison. anyone?

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