Welcome to this week's 7 Parenting Mistakes where Andrea (maybe) gives her daughter (and herself) a concussion! Read on.
RELATED: 7 Parenting Mistakes I Made This Week
- I somehow allowed my 5-month old to fall off the bed.
And it happened with my husband, my 10-year-old and me—EVERY member of our freakin’ family—standing in the room around her. I’d just given her a bath and put her in her PJs, and gave her to my husband who laid her down on the bed. And as much as I’d like to blame the whole thing on my husband, I noted that she shouldn’t be so close to the edge. I even said it, but I didn’t move her. No, I was too busy interrogating my 11-year-old son about the dent made in our wall during his birthday sleepover the previous night. And just at the height of my reaction to his story where I was giving my, “That’s RIDICULOUS!” face, I see a tiny, little body tumbling down the side of the bed in my periphery. Oh, f#*@!
She landed on her little hiney and only cried for 10 seconds, mostly out of being startled. And though my logical self knew that (thank God) she was all right, I spent the next hour doing a combination of moving my finger back and forth in front of her eyes, switching off and on the lights to check the dilation of her pupils and reenacting the fall myself, complete with hitting my head on the ground with the same force with which I guessed she had hit it.
I then continued to keep the poor baby girl awake in line with precautions usually taken for a potential concussion. Being that it all happened at her usual bedtime, however, she wanted to snooze. I kept obnoxiously clapping my hands and sharply saying “Hey!” in her face, and she kept looking at me like, “WTF, mom!”
- As if the falling off the bed wasn’t traumatic enough for my precious Stella; the next day as I was carrying her up the stairs to her nursery to change her, I turned the corner a little short and hit her head on the stairs’ handrail.
I honestly felt my stomach turn, and I immediately started to cry. She looked up at me, saw my grimaced face and made a pre-cry scowl, but turns out it was mostly out of sympathy, as she followed it up with a smile. We all know what the scene was for the next 10 minutes—me hitting my head against the handrail over and over at different speeds and degrees of force.
I sent Evan in with the boxes and told him to cut the damn doughnuts in half.
- I cheaped out on my son’s birthday goodies for his school class.
My recently turned-11-year-old wanted me to bring doughnuts from his favorite doughnut shop to his classmates for an in-class celebration. Being that we had already had three separate birthday celebrations for him with different groups of people, I wasn’t too keen on going big for his class. That morning, I stopped at his doughnut spot, and then realized that there are 43 freakin’ kids in his class which would mean spending 60 bucks all to infuse a bunch of already hyper 5th graders with sugar and bad cholesterol. I’d rather buy the class school supplies. (And also, maybe I was still harboring negativity about the dent in my wall.) But I ended up spending $30 to buy two dozen doughnuts. I sent Evan in with the boxes and told him to cut the damn doughnuts in half. Yes, I did that. I 'effing did that. And now my name on the yard is probably, “Evan’s mom, the CHEAP ASS MOM!”
RELATED: I Told My Toddler to Suck It Up
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I snuck away with my son to eat at Taco Bell behind my husband’s back.
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I let my son stay up until midnight on a school night this week because he looked so damn happy to be snuggled up with my husband watching DVR’d episodes of “I Shouldn’t Be Alive.”
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I’m breast-feeding, but I ate a buttload of sriracha sauce the other day because I just couldn’t resist that G-D stuff.
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I let both my baby daughter and my son sleep with us in our bed this week. And I guarantee that this will happen for as long as we can all fit.
Hopefully, amid this week’s parenting mayhem, I did a couple things right. Like right now, my baby is playing safely on her play mat ON THE FLOOR, and I just told my son that if he gave me a shoulder massage, I’d let him have half of my Diet Coke. Oh, wait.
