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It’d had been a busy day on not much sleep (though only the mildest of hangovers - I didn’t get blasted last night), but I’d done a supermarket shop and a long dog walk and been playing PJ Masks with my daughter (my son was also playing Owlette, but I don’t think he knew it - I called him Moist T-owelette, my kids don’t get how funny I am). Then we were off for a dog walk in the woods. Not that I really knew it. I was zonked out and thought we were going to the playground for some reason. I had no energy left for a tramp in the woods.
I put Ernie in the sling so he was facing out in front of me. But in my haste I had not correctly tied it up behind me and he was bobbing around much more than he should have been (though I only realised this was the problem when I took the sling off). I opened the back door and banged Ernie on the head. It wasn’t the worst bump, but a baby’s head is not something you really want to bash around too much. He cried for a bit and I felt bad. I was misjudging space, but also he was dangling further forward than usual.
At the car we put Wolfie in the boot and she was scampering around a bit in the small space and I was very conscious not to catch her in the boot as I closed it. Sadly I was concentrating so much on the dog that I forgot about the human strapped to my chest like that bloke in Total Recall and there was a sickening clunk of metal again soft head. Luckily I had been lowering the boot very very slowly because of my concern for the dog (fair enough, we could have another baby, but where would we get another dog?) and the injury was not a bad one and didn’t even leave a mark. But it left me sick with what could have been and my wife looking at me with disgust for damaging my baby’s head for the second time in as many minutes. At least if I had given Ernie amnesia with the first bump, I had now cured it with the second.
There were more tears and I feared that there might be some hairline fracture or blood clot that I couldn’t see. With the first kid we would undoubtedly have rushed to hospital to ensure all was fine, but this is child two and we have the experience now to know that these little dicks can survive almost anything. But I did think of what might have been had I been shutting the boot with less care. That’s a version of Sliding/Slamming Doors that I don’t want to contemplate. But my brain made me contemplate anyway. Knocking off my baby’s head, even by accident, would probably put me in my wife’s bad books for some time.
All was fine though, or at least we’ll have to wait to see how Ernie does at school to know if this has any long term effects.
I lightly bumped his head again when I got back in the car after the walk too, even though I was making really sure I didn’t. But I didn’t tell my wife about that one. It was the fault of the sling and it not being done up properly. Which admittedly is my fault. But that’s not my fault.
