And Then We Spent the Night in the ER

A while back, Carder began to protest his high chair.  We moved him into a booster seat at the table.

Also, call me a bad parent if you will, but I think it is next to impossible to sit right next to him the entire time he is at the table.  If he wants second helpings or needs his hands wiped or drops his drink and you need to wipe it up or if you need to grab ketchup from the fridge...you just can't ALWAYS be right next to him.  And he often eats better if you ignore him while he eats.  And in our open floor plan home I am only a couple of steps away if I am in the kitchen.

This new seating arrangement has been working fine - except he has learned that he can use his hands and feet to push himself away from the table.  Our chairs are pretty heavy, so typically this just results in pushing back.  But sometimes, the front legs of the chair would lift off the floor.

After repeatedly telling him that he needs to stop because his chair would flip, he finally flipped it over.  As we were getting ready to sit down to a meal, Carder was in his seat and I had walked into the kitchen to grab something else.  I saw it happening and couldn't do anything to stop it.  There was a huge thud as the chair hit the floor. 

I was (and still am) fairly certain that he didn't hit is head on anything.  He cried for a minute tops and said he was OK and then went on his merry way of playing and acting completely normal.  I wasn't really all that worried at that point.  We called the pediatrician just to be safe and his advice was to waken him a couple of times to make sure he wasn't too hard to arouse and that he knew who we were.

When we tried to wake him up before we went to bed, he was very groggy and hard to waken.  And then he didn't want to tell us that Derek was Daddy or who any people in pictures were or who our dogs were.  How much of this was because he was tired and 2 and what could be attributed to a concussion we weren't sure.  So off to the ER we went.  And I was in a panic.

We got checked in around midnight.  After we were escorted into a room and got settled in, the nurse brought him a toy and a book.  And within 5 minutes he was fully awake and telling us all about everything and was obviously fine.

3 hours later we saw the doctor (who confirmed he was fine) and were sent on our way.

Luckily he slept until 10 the next morning because we all needed the extra sleep!

The moral of this story is - if you have a child who is getting to be a daredevil, wake them up in the middle of the night so that you can have a baseline to compare it should you ever need to waken your child from a deep sleep to check for a concussion!