I think that I am finally ready to share this story:Sadie was only a little over a month old when I was getting ready to have a day of shopping with my sister. Part of my routine was to put Sadie on the bed next to me while I dried my hair. After my hair was dry, I set the blow dryer down and two seconds later, Sadie screamed like I had never heard her scream before. At first, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with her but it didn't take long to realize that I had set the blow dryer too close to her little hands and she had been burned by touching the hot metal. Blake and I rushed her over to the sink to run cold water over her injury while she continued to scream and I felt terrible. It was a bad burn and she was so little.
Once my sister got to our place, we ran over to the drug store to buy some baby Tylenol. For the next few days we kept her hand wrapped up and luckily, it healed fine. She doesn't even have a scar to remind me of that awful day. This little incident was really hard on me because I felt like I wasn't a good mom. How could I be so careless and set such a hot item next to a brand new baby?
It didn't take me long to realize that there would be more moments where I would feel inadequate as a mother. Not just the times when I caused her bodily harm, like when I slammed her fingers in the car door or forgot to buckle her into the car seat before driving to the store. But more recently, when I feel like I have failed for the day when she has watched WAY too many cartoons because I didn't have the energy to entertain her or when I lose my patience and yell at her because she thought her bears needed to take a bath in the toilet.
I have learned that I can't be too hard on myself, though. It doesn't help anything by beating myself up over my parenting mistakes/accidents. I just have to laugh at myself, be grateful that I didn't harm her too bad and keep the hot blow dryers far away from her reach.
2 comments:
Your attentiveness in and of itself makes you a great mother, Lindsey.
Summer was only 2 weeks old and I just had to go pick my own strawberries to put up for the year. Cami was helping at age 3 and I was working fast to get finished and heard Summer crying a few rows over, and didn't realize I had left her in the sun and she had BLISTERS already on the bridge of her nose and cheeks! Yikes! And this was my second child!
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