The Adventures of Danger Mom

Sam hit three exciting new milestones last week:

1. straining to take a poo for the very first time
2. crawling at breakneck speed (well, "breakneck" compared to his previous land speed record of 0 mph), which led to milestone #3...
3. falling off the bed

Numbers 1 and 3 seem like tough lessons to learn so close together. From now on, he's only going to grow in his awareness that gravity is a harsh mistress and that pooping is work. It must already seem to his eight-and-a-half-month-old self that seven-and-a-half-months... those were the glory days.

Poor guy.

And poor me.

This crawling business has me slightly freaking out. Remember the movie Raising Arizona? There's a scene in which Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter's characters, Hi and Ed, are having lunch with another couple and their kids, and the other woman (played brilliantly by Frances McDormand) gets Ed in a nervous tizzy that has her repeating anxiously to Hi, "What about his dip-tet, honey? We have to get his dip-tet!"

I feel kind of like that. Actually, I feel more like Hi in the next scene, where's he's walking in the desert, oblivious to his surroundings, a pained, anxious look on his face while he wrings his hat in his hands.

None of this is helped by my newfound fear that I'm not the safety-conscious person I thought I was, a fact brought home by a recent incident in which I temporarily forgot that you don't put out a wax fire with water. Doing so causes mind-bogglingly huge Hollywood-type fireballs to shoot out of the fireplace, momentarily engulf your head in flames, and singe off the tips of your eyebrows and eyelashes. (This really happened. Kris and Anne-Marie are my witnesses.)

I'm cutting and pasting a transcript of an IM conversation I had with the mister later that day:

him: but why didn't you just use the fire extinguisher?
me: what fire extinguisher?
him: the one in the kitchen
me: i thought it was dead
him: it's not dead, i just had it recharged while you were pregnant
me: well, you can't expect me to remember anything that happened when i was PREGNANT
him: arghhhhhh!
me: besides, don't you think pulling out a fire extinguisher in front of guests would look a little, you know, drama queeny?
him: AAAARRRRGH!!!

He thinks he got the last word by giving me the nickname "Danger Mom," but in fact I'm the one who won because I like it. Shhh... don't tell.

But seriously, my confidence is shaky right now. And it's not helped by the fact that I keep thinking that, no matter how uber-safe I am, all it takes is one tiny little slip, a teensy lapse of time or judgment, and the whole house of cards could come tumbling down. Remember Sleeping Beauty? How her parents rid the entire kingdom of every spindle after hearing the dark fairy's dire prediction? That's what I call extreme babyproofing. And fat lot of good it did them.

Still, you gotta do what you gotta do. Since Friday afternoon, we've made trips to IKEA, Home Depot, and our local hardware store. We've been making lists, gathering supplies, bickering over who is least incompetent with a screwdriver, and spending a lot of time lying on the floor trying to see our world through Sam's incredibly curious little eyes.

And why? Because babies may be cute and all, but when it comes to self-preservation, they're just not all that bright. Forget sticking his finger in a mere light socket: Sam would put on a tinfoil suit, lie in a puddle, and eat pure electricity if he could.

Mark the time. This is the precise moment that I finally internalized the fact that I'm never going to have a good night's sleep again.