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.

SciFi Dad wrote:

We have gates at the top of each set of stairs (although in recent months the only one that gets closed is the upstairs one at night since she is old enough now to use stairs responsibly).

We also have cabinet locks and electrical outlet covers commonly found in most homes with a young child.

As for our close call? It’s probably a little more extreme than most people’s, but I’ll give the brief version here (the extended version is available in an old post: http://talesfromthedadside.blogspot.com/2006/03/tws-laid-up-dad.html).

It was 4am and my daughter (then 13 months) had called out for milk. My wife had not been getting much sleep lately, so I went and got my daughter and started carrying her down the stairs. I was probably still half asleep or at the very least groggy, because I missed the top step after our landing and fell down the stairs. I cradled my daughter in my arms as best as I could, and in the process did nothing to protect myself. She was fine; startled, but still signing for milk. I, on the other hand, had dislocated my foot and broken my fibula in two.

They will each receive a new Schick Quattro as a small way of saying thanks for sharing your “close call” with the rest of us.