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| It's not I, but accurately depicts how I look tonight/this morning. |
I'm not going in to the lab today. It's an hour's drive on the freeway, or mostly freeway (US101 is a highway in a few places), and my mom said I cannot safely make the drive at 7:30 if I'm still awake at 6:00 in the morning. I could go, as I'm 18, but I'm living in my parents' home, so I need to follow their rules. I'm not the defiant type, anyway. I really think I'd be OK, but I can't go and it's final.
My mom asked if anything is bothering me. I told her about the Internet problems She said just to block the lady of I could, and to ignore her otherwise, and as far as the author, she probably has better things to do than to worry about the accuracy of anything I did or didn't write, but that I should be cautious. I thought I was being cautious and relying on the horse's own mouth in terms of things that the authors or the author's siblings had said in books. She said the author has to have better things to do, but if I can think of anything I might have posted that might have been the impetus, I might want to remove it.
All we have to do is put in our required number of hours, and I'm ahead on my hours anyway. We have five days that we can call in before we're put on any sort of probation, and I haven't used any. If my dad calls, they'll take the excuse seriously and I won't even get any mental black marks next to my name.
I hate to waste the day. Once I go to sleep and wake up, I can do what I want, because my dad isn't lying and saying I'm sick. I'll probably hang out with Jillian's extended family, many of whom are here from Florida for an anniversary party for Jillian's parents. There are lots of babies and really little kids. Jared's Aunt Brooke is bringing her six little girls, and Jared's mom is bringing her children except for Jared, who doesn't want to hang out with a horde of little kids. Alyssa, my friend who is Jared's cousin, is here. we'll help keep tabs on the children together, They'll go to the zoo while I'm asleep, but later they'll go to the park and to the beach.
My Aunt Ilianna and Uncle Jerry's neighbors nearly lost their 20-month old daughter to a drowning accident. Her mom was going to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. The baby's father was doing something with the pool for just a minute while the baby was playing with toys in the family room. He left the gate unlatched because he was going back out. The baby, Roxanna, can open the safety latch on the sliding glass door and she did. She walked right out and into the pool. The father walked through the house to the garage to get a tool, then walked back and saw the sliding glass door opened. He screamed and the 3-year-old was so smart that she got up out of bed (she was sick) and called 911. She carried the phone downstairs to see what was going on and was able to tell the dispatcher that the baby had fallen into the pool and that daddy was getting her out.
The baby was probably in the water a total of about two minutes. The dad started CPR immediately, and the paramedics were there in about seven minutes.
She wasn't conscious for about eleven hours, but then she woke up. She's walking and talking. She should be released from the hospital this morning. There's no guarantee that there won't be some learning disability down the road, but from all appearances, the child is fine and no neurological damage was detected. Their pool isn't heated and has a lot of shade from trees, and they live in kind of a fog pit, so their pool is somewhat cold..That may have worked to the child's advantage. Whatever the situation turns out to be, they're lucky she even survived. If she has difficulty learning to read, they'll deal with it.
We don't even have children at our house most of the time, and we keep our pool locked unless one of us is in it or lying on recliner beside it, just in case someone with kids comes over and we don't think to lock it when they arrive. If you actually have kids, you have to be even more careful. I don't suppose Roxanna's father will ever make that mistake again. Their baby had been given one round of swimming lessons, but there is no such thing as drown-proofing a baby or very young child.
I suppose maybe I can go to sleep if I don't have to try so hard. I'd rather go to work, but I don't have the option.
I have friends who lost their toddler daughter to a drowning. I didn't know them when their daughter drowned. I met them through Epinions and then met them at person at an Epinions Meet and Greet. It's shocking how quickly something like that can happen. The pool at our house has a fence around it that Bill and I had to figure out, It actually took some doing.
ReplyDeleteThis is a powerful read about my friend's daughter...
http://www.epinions.com/content_3837042820
It is a powerful story. I understandt they're not ready to share it all yet. My dad, who does two eR shifts a month, talks about how all it takes is a bucket of water. Little ones are so head-heavy that they cannot right themselves if they fall head-down into water. My dad had witnessed in the ER the drowning death of a baby in a toilet and the near-drowning of an older baby (maybe fifteen months) who climbed atop a counter where his mother had been doing dishes and had left the room when a slightly child was crying because he got his hand caught in a door. She ran to the older child, and the baby, who was a skilled climber, pushed a chair to the counter, carawled on top of the conter, and went head-first into the dishwater and couldn't right himself. he made if, thank God. Babies drown in running bath water, in wading pools. My dad convinced my mom's best friend that she absolutely had to fill her wading pool each time she ued it, and empty it when they left the pool, even if it was multiple times a day in perenially drought-stricken central california. He told her to move the pool around and use it as a partial way of watring the lawn. He said he knew her baby boy too well and that the child was too active and curious, and that he'd end up drowned in the wading pool if she once left it filled. My mom's friend was already paranoid about water with children as well and had refused to move into a home with a pool when she first married, because she didn't want to live in a pool with babies, which she expected to have soon enough. once she had children, anytime she visited hrr in-laws, who had a pool with no fencing between the sliding glass door and the pool, she made the babies wear life jackets the entire time they were at the house except when they were in bed, and she put loud jingle bells on the door of the room where the babies slept, and used ababy monitor as well. between my dad and my mom's best friend, I don't know who was more water-paranoid.
ReplyDeleteWe didn't move into a house with a pool until I was nine yearsold, and then my parents put an eight-foot wrought iron fence between the house and the pool that was locked whenever my parents weren't swimming or watching us swim, even when we were teens. I probably could've climbed even a wrought iron fence with my gymnastic skills as a toddler, much less as a nine-year-old, but my parents had put sufficient fear into both of us that I would not have dared. I would have taken my chances robbing a bank as soon as I would have entered the pool area withut permission. When we were teens, they didn't watch nearly so closely, as in maybe from inide through the sliding glass door on occasion, but they still supervised. This was after my brother and I had both taken lifesaving and Water Safety Instruction and were qualified to teach swimming and were probably better swimmers than they were.
But babies and toddlers are especially vulnerable. Even an ice chest with melted ice will hold a tiny child head-down until he or she drowns.
If you look at the bottom of that post I linked, you'll see a link to his wife's perspective, which gives a more complete account of what happened. Amy was home when it happened.
ReplyDeleteI think after reading that story, I would not want to have a pool if I had small kids around. It's just so easy for them to drown. Then there are the accounts of kids getting trapped in vents and stuff, like Usher's kid.
My parents bypassed a lot of houses when we were little because the houses came with pools. We were in less house than we could afford until I was nine because in our neck of the woods, nice houses came with pools, and my parents refused to live with one on their property. We lived in neighborhoods where there were neighborhood association pools, but no pools on our property.
ReplyDeleteWhen my brother was 16 1/2, my parents came home unexpectedly to find him in the pool with two friends. He lost pool and driving privileges for a month because it was an unbendable rule that we were not allowed in the pool without at least one parent at home, awake, and aware we were in the pool.
Pools are every bit as deadly as guns where children are concerned if not handled carefully. i personally think it shuld be illegal for a child under, say, five years old to live in a house in which there is no secure fencing between the house and the pool. if you can't afford a fence, you can't afford a pool.
Still, where this poor family is concerned, all the second guessing in the world won't bring their baby back.