My Parenting Fail

There was (and still is) something that I really need to blog about and get it off my chest, but as is often the way with two small children, something more dramatic has happened in the meantime. It is somewhat reminiscent of Glowless' incident with Tricky the other day caused by a Parental Parody style parenting fail.*

Wombat didn't have his usual deep sleeps during the day today, more of a quick cat nap here and there. Seagull didn't have a nap at all. On top of that, we went for a walk down the street and Seagull walked nearly the whole way home instead of riding in the pram. The walk normally takes me a good 20 minutes at my walking pace and we were walking at the pace of a 2 1/2 year old, so it was pretty slow and a very long walk for Seagull.

Fast forward to this evening, and both boys are really tired. We all had a bath and got ready for bed. By this time, Wombat was hanging for a feed and a sleep. Thunder Maker is at band practice tonight, so as I usually try to do in this situation, I tried to get Seagull to have a snuggle up against my back while I was feeding Wombat in the bed. Seagull had other ideas.

Seagull has worked out that he can drag our bar stools around into the kitchen. He then climbs up on top of them and helps himself to whatever has been left on top of the bench. I figured that for once, it was all fairly sparse as all dry food items (such as sugar, flour and Weet Bix) had been stashed well out of the realms of a sneaky Seagull.

After a while, some fairly loud Seagull screaming came from the direction of the kitchen. Thinking that Seagull had fallen over and hurt himself, I called for him to come and give me a cuddle, as I still had Wombat attached for his feed. He didn't come. He kept screaming. Then the screaming got so hysterical that it sounded almost like he was laughing. I closed up shop on Wombat (who fortunately stayed asleep) and went to investigate.

I was greeted by the sight of cornflour spread over half the kitchen floor. Nan had made a lemon meringue pie for dessert and left the packet of cornflour on the bench. As I rounded the corner, I saw Seagull up at the kitchen sink, with his toes only just touching the bar stool that he had used to get up there with. I got closer and realised that Seagull had shoved two of his fingers into the drain holes of the sink up to the second knuckles and was stuck. Oh crap.

I gave his hand a tug to see if I could pull it out, which elicited a huge scream. I then pushed the bar stool closer so that his whole body weight wasn't hanging by his fingers and contemplated my next move. Thankfully, common sense kicked in, courtesy of the bottle of dishwashing detergent that sauntered casually into my line of view. I reached over Seagull to grab it, squeezed a heap of it around his fingers and worked it in. The first finger slipped out almost immediately and the second one came out with a bit more gentle persuasion.

Seagull's fingers were big, fat, red and bent at a funny angle. I immediately thought of taking him to the hospital, then realised that Thunder Maker has the car with the car seats in it at band practice. I called the emergency department at the hospital and was told that it was very unlikely that Seagull had broken anything. The nice nurse told me to give him some Panadol, a cuddle and see if he would settle.

By this stage, Seagull's finger was bleeding all over his hand and he was trying to give me a cuddle. Ah, no, not with that bloody hand, he wasn't. I washed his hand off and stuck a band-aid over the bleeding bit. Then I gave him some Panadol. Thankfully, he likes taking medicine and gulped it all down quite gratefully.

Seagull is now snuggled up in bed next to Wombat giving his Teddy big cuddles, apparently not too worse the wear for my parenting fail.

* I say that with much love and humour. Plus, Georgia says that sort of thing about herself all the time. :)