July 24, 2002 - Wednesday
Last night at about 3:35am, Jeremy fell out of his crib. He didn't cry very long so we can only assume that he didn't fall on his head or anything terribly sensitive and was more surprised than anything else. Nonetheless, I guess it's clear that we should have lowered the mattress in his crib. Harry surprised us with his early ability to stand up in the crib, and we immediately lowered the mattress on him because of it. Jeremy certainly surprised us last night, but he shouldn't have. He's been crawling for a month and practicing standing for several days now and that should have been a tip off that he could get up and potentially over the crib railing.

It's easy to say he's the second child and that's the reason. It's cliché, but there's no doubt that it is true. But, that stereotypical second child neglect, as I've said before, is not about caring less, it's about focusing less and that's about distractions, logistics, and fatigue. A lot of people say that raising two small children is a lot of work and there's no doubt that that is true, too. It's tiring to have these little people constantly pulling in different directions, many different directions at once, and it is clearly mentally wearing. Last night on the way home from a town government meeting, I picked up a gallon of milk at the store. Then, in the five minutes it took to get home, I forget about it and left it in the car over night. Silly mistakes like that do happen, of course, and I've certainly made many, but that type of silly mistake wasn't that common for me before I had these young distractions.

At 3:40am last night I made a decision to not lower Jeremy's mattress during the night. I did look for the needed Allen wrench, but it was not where I thought. I had others in the basement, but it would likely make a fair amount of noise and possibly wake Harry and that didn't seem worth it when we were trying to get Jeremy back to sleep. Of course, there was no putting Jeremy back, but that was OK. He went right back to sleep, after a little drink, snugly atop and amid a blanket on our bedroom floor. He plays in there regularly and there isn't much serious trouble to be found, at least not before one of us would wake up. And, he did sleep until he's usual time in the morning, when, after a couple of soft hoots and gruts to open his parents eyes, his little cabbage head popped up above the foot of our bed, complete with its typical two-toothed grin and cheerful giggle. I guess he was all right and hadn't held anything against us.


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