Posted by Caleb in Kansas [172.68.34.103] on Thursday, July 26, 2018 at 23:05:17 :
I saw a post below that jogged my memory from something I overheard last weekend. We were at an appreciation pot luck for the Doulas we hired with the last 2 kids and I heard one of the other parents talking about some kind of alarm thing that goes on an infant car seat that will trigger an alarm on your keychain if you get too far away. Sounded like a good idea.... as terrible as that sounds...
I guess my brain is wired different, but I have never even come close to leaving my children in the car other than when loading or unloading stuff and I've trained myself to roll down a window or leave a door opened. Maybe I've taken my kids with me to the scrap yard too many times. I don't leave the kids in any of my old iron for the simple reason that most of it doesn't even have a parking brake... nor are they allowed to play around those old vehicles without me there.
Now, while I don't understand the term "baby brain", I've watched my wife do some things that are totally out of her normal "control freak" character and totally dumbfounded me at the time... it's been more common with the 3rd baby, so I can at least believe when some mother forgets her sleeping baby is in the car, Hell, I've gone right to work without dropping the boys off at daycare after being caught up in thinking over everything needing to be done at work (was instantly reminded when I looked in the mirror to find two very confused faces). Sometimes it's innocent, sometimes people are just that stupid.
My wife has voiced this fear of what if she went off the road into water, or the car caught fire with the kids inside (probably doesn't help that I've been called to a bunch of them lately... all 2010 and newer vehicles oddly enough... plastic hoods sure make my job easier) so I bought her a nice rescue knife for her birthday, well, a week or so later, she had just finished grocery shopping, loaded up everything, strapped the 2 year old in... then "baby brain" kicked in. It was near 100 degrees so she was thinking about putting him in the hot car so she locked the doors and used the remote start... threw her keys on the front seat... and closed the back door locking him in the now running black car. Instantly realizing what she had done, she called me, rather alarmed, and asked what to do. I was 30 minutes away... remote start only runs for 10 minutes max before shutting off... as I'm thinking through what to tell her, she remembers she has that knife in her purse. Now, when I gave it to her, I was going to instruct here on how to safely take a vehicle window, but at the time she didn't want anything "mansplained" to her. Now she was in the situation that required that kind of knowledge to handle the situation at hand... since it had yet to become an actual emergency, I got her calmed down and told her which window to take and how to take it without any safety gear. 5 seconds later, she's in.
While I'm aware of her rather ultra - liberal feminist leanings, I'm still having difficulty getting her to understand when I'm "mansplaining" something seemingly simple, or adding all this intricate detail because it's the detail that is important. She was going to break the window next to the child... it's closer... but the detail of the situation is that #1) It is not yet an actual emergency. #2) Because it's not an emergency, you don't risk the flying glass and glass dust or creates. #3) Which window is cheapest to replace...LOL... turns out it's one of the rear doors... so she took out the furthest one away...$450 later, no emergency at all. Bonus is that she's now had hands on training in vehicle extrication.
The most concerning thing of all wasn't the situation itself, but people's reactions. Not a single person, seeing an obviously distraught woman frantically running around a running car, even inquired about what was wrong... including the mother with two children getting into the SUV parked RIGHT NEXT TO MY WIFE! My former boss was waiting in his car not 100 feet away and observed the whole thing even. Situational awareness people!
I'm done, thanks for listening.
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