Comments on: Child Safety – Close Call Comment Contest

By: Lin

Lin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:16:47 +0000

My then- 14 yr old teenage son chose to break the rules about no involvement in “chat rooms”. He began “chatting” with someone my son thought was another 14 yr old boy claiming to live in the next town over. They secretly played internet games online together while everyone else was asleep, and over a period of a couple weeks, my son became very secretive and sneaky. I’d catch him on the computer in the middle of the night, having managed to discover how to bypass the lock-down passcode. Red flags were flying in my mind (since he had been molested by a church minister while in church at a young age), and being a divorced mother of six I was very concerned. Readers Digest version is that I installed computer monitoring software on the computer and discovered with the help of the police that this so-called teen was a registered sex offender trying to get to my son.

Lesson learned? Computer savvy teens can easily bypass parental controls, so parents had better be prepared for who is lurking out there to get to their kids. Children bloggers? I shake my head in fear for who is talking to those kid-bloggers.

By: Carolyn Bahm

Carolyn Bahm — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:32:58 +0000

My oldest child is 18, but this happened when she was not quite 2. I was taking a break from blowing bubbles with her to change her diaper. I set the bubbles down beside us on the sofa and turned to reach the wipes and a diaper from the nearby diaper bag. When I turned back around, she had somehow opened the giant bottle of bubbles and upended it into her mouth, nose, and eyes and was dark red in the face, not breathing. I’d taken a CPR class, so I did everything I could think of but was frantic — holding her upside down so the fluid would drain out, flipping her off and doing blows to the back, etc. It seemed like forever before she took a shuddering breath.

Lesson learned — don’t put anything near babies if you don’t want it going in their eyes, noses, or mouths.

By: MPS

MPS — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:39:28 +0000

At work so I’ll have to keep this short.

At around 3 yrs, my son nearly choked on a grape. Yes, it’s possible.

I did something like a Heimlich on him and it popped out, thank G-D. Scared the living crap outta me.

Lesson learned: cut grapes in half until the kids are old enough to swallow them whole.

Also, an unsecured computer table once fell on top of our kid. This was some cheap-ass piece of crap we bought at IKEA I think. He was leaning on the keyboard tray and the whole thing toppled over on him.

Lesson learned: don’t buy cheap-ass furniture from IKEA, and if you must, bolt it to the wall.

By: Hip_M0M

Hip_M0M — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:28:51 +0000

I can think of many “close calls” but the one that was probably the scariest was one that I wrote about on my blog last year right after it happened…I’m not proud of the situation at all but I felt as though letting people know about the mistake I made might help them avoid similar ones:

http://happyhealthyhip.blogspot.com/2007/09/ouch-and-oh-no.html

By: tom

tom — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:36:47 +0000

I posted about this once. My three-year-old was “helping” me fix the toilet in the upstairs bathroom, and was playing with some long-nosed pliers. Just after I’d flooded the floor with water, I heard him ask “how do these cut?” and turned around to see him start to clamp the plier’s cutters down on an electrical cord.

I stopped him but only microseconds before disaster.

The lesson: if you’re going to let your kids play with tools, don’t give them cutters, keep your eyes on them constantly, and don’t be around electrical cords that are plugged into the wall.

toms latest discovery was..Tales of the Trip, part 2: No Rest for the Weary