Before I married and had children, I knew I was going to be the perfect mother. I had read all the books. I studied Elementary Education with a BA at Weber State University. I worked five years at a daycare and ten for the Salt Lake City School District. I knew all the answers.
My first son was a handful from day one. He cried in the car. He cried in the stroller. He cried in my arms. He had reflux and knew how to use it. Don, my husband, and I would spend hours each night walking up and down the street trying to calm
Kyath. We figured people would realize we weren't abusing our child when they saw he was crying hysterically despite our efforts.
One day we realized the power of a wet washcloth. I don't remember how it came about. I just know that one time when Ky was crying, we put a damp washcloth on his head and it calmed him down. I still remember one time while visiting my parents, my mom frantically ran to get a washcloth to drape on his head. He had everyone at his beckoned call.
Ky liked to climb. I believe Ky started climbing before he learned to walk. He could pull himself up on the couch before he could take a step. When he was nine months old I remember him climbing up on the
refrigerator while I was meeting in the kitchen with some of my co-workers. They freaked out. They were amazed that I was not surprised or rattled. But by nine months he had already taken any surprise out of me.
He was so much of a climber that I could never get him to stay in a car seat. He was like Houdini the way he could escape. I had no sooner buckled him in and he had already climbed out of his seat. I bought four other car seats and would swap them weekly to try to stay ahead of Ky.
Ky also had a
fetish with keys. Sometimes I would just let him play with my keys because it was the only thing that would keep him calm. I remember one day in church a lady came up to me almost crying, telling me that keys were the worst thing I could let my baby play with. It made me mad that she would try to take away one of the few things that actually kept Ky quiet.
I knew I was in trouble the day
Kyath escaped out of his car seat on the freeway. He was out of the seat like a monkey on crack. He reached for the door before I could stop him. He had it open with the freeway wind swirling in. I grabbed the handle and held the door until I could pull over. I was lucky he didn't fall out of the 65 mph car. He couldn't have been more than one and a half years-old at the time.
Kyath's fascination with cars and keys didn't stop there. He was two when he had his first accident. I was visiting Brandi at her house.
Kyath was playing in the van with the keys. (Note to self: Never let children play in vehicle with actual keys.) Somehow he turned the key enough and pulled it out of gear. Just my luck, I was parked facing down on a sloped street. The van started to roll down the hill. I was quick to react and kept pace with the van, running next to Ky. I went to open the door to slam on the brakes. But
Kyath had locked all the doors. He was crying and trying to hide while the van picked up momentum. Luckily, the van hit a tree. I don't know how an air bag didn't go off, but thank goodness it didn't. After the van came to a screeching halt, I tried to get
Kyath to open the door. He wouldn't. I found the hide-a-key under the van and unlocked the door.
I thought we would have a
hiatus from
catastrophe, at least for a while. But Ky was just getting into his own. I always had to be a few steps of Ky because he was such a busy kid. He was always trying to escape out of the house, just so he could explore. Locking doors didn't help. He could climb the door and unlock it. (Yes at two. It was something you had to see for yourself to believe.) I put deadbolts up at the top of all the doors where he couldn't climb or reach. One would have thought that was enough.
One day my foster mother-in-law called. Don had just left for a bike ride and Ky and I were alone. I couldn't have been on the phone for more than five minutes. All the doors were locked and there was a dowel locking the sliding glass door that led to a fenced backyard. The house went quiet and I knew
Kyath was up to something. I knew that I had created a sealed vault and there was no way to escape, or was there?
When I realized Ky had taken out the dowel, slid open the sliding glass door and escaped to the backyard, I was not surprised. I went out in the backyard expecting to find him playing in the sand. But he was no where to be found. I walked through the open gate and out into the cul-de-sac. It was quiet and held no traces of the Tasmanian that had just toddled past.
I preceded to check each neighbors yard. Surely he had wandered into one of the yards and was sidetracked by a grasshopper or butterfly. As I neared the end of the street, I realized that I may need more help trying to find the little guy. I wished Don were back from his bike ride, but there was nothing I could do about that.
I started asking neighbors if they had seen him. We quickly realized that he was no where to be found. There is nothing like trying to sense where your child is and feeling nothing. When we all started panicking, a neighbor yelled that they had found Kyath.
A good Samaritan found him a street away at the corner of a busy street, pushing the walk signal so he could cross. When he realized that this little two year old was traveling on his own, he called the police. The police man came down the street to see if his neglectful mother was even looking for her little child. He turned on to a street full of panic stricken people. Just then, Don returned home from his bike ride. He had a hysterical wife and an oblivious child that were both happy to see him.
