not a happy post

Really, it's not. Lest I cause you any undue panic, though, S-Boogie is all right.

There is nothing worse than seeing your child choking with the blind cord around her neck. Foxy and I had a horrible scare this afternoon while we were trying to do our taxes online. Thankfully Foxy saw what was happening before it was too late, but there were a couple seconds of panic followed by a lot of crying. S-Boogie has a couple red lines on her neck where the cord was. It's interesting how in the moment all you can think of is what to do--in this case all it took was getting our fingers between the cord and her neck, then untangling it--but then you spend the next hours going over and over what could have happened. I still feel a little shaky.

I keep going back to that image of S-Boogie standing on the bed in front of the window, and that brings me back to another image. One day while Foxy and I were engaged--on the day we were going to take our announcement pictures, in fact--I went to my park attendant job in Provo. I started cleaning the bathroom, then noticed a boy standing oddly under a tree. He was hunched over and swaying back and forth. As I approached him I realized there was a jumprope around his neck, going up to a tree branch. "Hey," I said, "you shouldn't play like that." Then I saw that his feet weren't touching the ground. I ran to the nearest house, where I asked to use the phone. I couldn't bring myself to tell the 911 operator what was obvious--that he was dead--so instead I sputtered out something about a boy choking with a jumprope around his neck. The firemen and police (I don't remember an ambulance but surely there was an ambulance too) arrived shortly and I watched as they assessed the situation. They put up tarps around the boy but I noticed quite a while later that I could still see his feet hanging under the tarp. The whole time I waited there and as they interviewed me for the police report, I had this eerie feeling of having witnessed something horrible and not really feeling anything because I had no connection to it. Later when I picked Foxy J up at school and started to tell her about it is when I cried.

The pictures we took that evening were no good; we returned to take more later that week.

S-Boogie recovered from the whole thing this afternoon much quicker than Foxy or I did. Within minutes she was giggling and dancing and kissing. She reminded me matter-of-factly as I put her down for a nap that "Mommy crying," which was apparently the worst part of it all for her. It would be nice to be a toddler.