Skip to main content

Panic

I was in the car today, driving Ella to pick up Amanda from school, and I realized that it was awfully quiet. Luke is almost always talking. I looked back and didn't see Luke in the car. "Luke! Luke! are you here!" I yelled. Ella looked up from her book, and said in a worried voice, "No, he's not in the car!"

As you can imagine, my thoughts immediately went back to the house where I must have left him---I had a million things to remember today (we went from string lessons to social group to dinner to Taekwondo), and I have always worried that I would end up forgetting a person. I did once forget Amanda in a waiting room for 3 minutes when I went in to Ella's gym class, although she was 3 months old at the time... "Poor Luke! He must be so worried! He was probably bawling and terrified! He'll never trust me again!" I worried silently. I needed to get off the highway right then, call Michael to pick up Amanda, call the string teacher to apologize for being late to the lesson...

And then I remembered why Luke wasn't in the car. When the girls have lessons, I need to participate so that I can help (especially Amanda) during the week. I can't also be chasing and amusing Luke in a very small room for an hour, so I drop him off at a drop-in childcare place. He had been completely happy and safe when I dropped him off.

I haven't felt anything like the combination of relief and stupidity (for imagining such a silly scenario) before. Hopefully, I won't have to feel it again any time soon.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things that are true

"Axial tilt is the reason for the season." (Picture a globe with the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun...) I believe this is meant to be an anti-theist slogan, although I would point out that I believe there is a reason for the axial tilt. This is a runner up to my favorite true science picture, the "Gravity Forecast." I linked to this when I was a graduate student, but the site is long since down. Picture a weather forecast graphic, but instead of clouds and temperatures, the 5-day forecast predicts 9.8 m/s^2 down. Even the idea still makes me laugh, perhaps I will reproduce it someday. Luke cut his 4th tooth today (Finally!). So far they haven't caused us too much trouble. We'll see what happens when he gets his canines.
8 comments
Read more

Science at home

We had a fun "experiment" yesterday. We took a 2 liter bottle of diet Coke and some Mentos, put 4 Mentos at the same time into the bottle, and shot a huge jet of soda into the air about 8 feet high! It was quite exciting, although I think the warnings that you might want to use eye protection were a bit overblown. I suppose that it was an experiment only in the loosest sense of the term, but Michael forsees lots of fun in the future: using other types of soda, other methods for adding the mentos to the soda, and so on. It did get us out of the house for a while, and had Eleanor and Amanda dropping mentos into the used soda bottle and watching to see what happened---so cute!
2 comments
Read more

A day at the fair

Yesterday afternoon the whole family went to the NC state fair. We had a good enough time that I think we are going back next year, although perhaps we will leave Luke at home with a sitter. We went right after Eleanor's school. Michael picked up Eleanor, I drove Luke and Amanda. Through an amazing bit of timing, we met in the parking lot and walked to the fair together, about a 10 minute walk (not bad at all, really). I had meant to get to the fair much earlier and see the parts that Eleanor and Michael claimed not to be interested in (the animals and crafts, mostly) but I was running a little late. Our area has been in a serious drought for the past few months, so I am not complaining that it rained (hard) on us as we were getting to the gate. But it does seem a bit hard that we planned to go to the fair on the one day in the past 3 months that we had a rainstorm. Fortunately, the rain was scattered, and the clouds soon moved off to water another area. We took the opportun...
5 comments
Read more