Remembering

Julie's doctor appointment today went well. The cervix door still has a "Gone fishing" sign on it, but the doctor said it's getting thinner. Um, thinner? Oh, and (swallow your breakfast now) the doctor could feel the head through the cervix door.

OH MY EFFING GOD.

I think the doctor could more like sense the head there; I highly doubt it was a scratch-behind-the-ears, coochie-coochie-coo scenario with the baby thinking to herself, "What the hell was that?"

Anyway, moving on now because that's not what I want to talk about. I have car seats on the brain, specifically the unthinkably tragic notion of accidentally leaving the kid in the car seat. Here is an instance of a good person whose brain goes completely bonkers for one day and as a result the person loses the child, gets charged with a crime, ruins the marriage, and becomes a guilt-ridden pariah forever. It's the ultimate mistake and yet it happens every year to multiple parents.

There are two major problems that young parents need to tackle. One is how to prevent this from ever happening. Two is how to not become a raving neurotic in the process.

So first I must say that it's criminal that car seat and car companies haven't figured this out. All it would take is a weight sensor in the base of the car seat that's connected to your car's alarm and automatic locks. As soon as your car is shut off with doors closed and locked, any weight in that car seat would trigger the car's alarm. Further, the alarm wouldn't be the typical BEEP BEEP BEEP that everyone is accustomed to ignoring. It would be a more startling, faster, staccato series of beeps. Easy fix to this problem, hundreds of lives saved and even more prevented from ruin. I am a genius; now give me a million dollars.

Julie and I were brainstorming other precautions. What if you kept a big hair scrunchy on the car seat, and every time you put the kid in it, you put the scrunchy on your wrist? And the scrunchy would have an obnoxious object tied to it, say a giant plastic penis. Even if you forgot the kid and forgot about the scrunchy, someone would say, "Hey, what's with the penis?" and your kid's life would be saved.

But your temperament would determine your commitment to the exercise. If you grew tired of the scrunchy idea and stopped wearing it, then it obviously wouldn't be effective. However, if you were a person mainly worried about spacing out during changes of routine--say you're the one driving to daycare today, not your spouse--then maybe you use the dick trick only during those occasions.

For me, I need something to do every single time I exit a car, whether it's my car or not. I'm an all-or-nothing person. You'll note that I write every day, not when I randomly feel like it. And so this topic reminds me of Boy Scouts when I took lifesaving merit badge. The problem with saving a drowning person is that it's human nature to want to jump in after them even though this is precisely the wrong thing to do. A 30-pound toddler who's filled with panic and adrenaline can drown a grown man. So our instructor taught us a rhyme and made us say it every single time we entered the water. Fifteen years later, I still remember it.

"Reach, throw, row, go with support as a last resort."

The saying indicates the order of methods you should use to save someone in the water. What makes it effective, though, is that it interrupts human nature. Human nature says jump in and save the person. Human nature can also say, "My baby isn't in the car." The brain has blind spots. For me, the method that might work is to make up a stupid rhyme that will shine a light on those blind spots. Here's what I've come up with:

"Time to get out and go? Well maybe. I have my brain, but do I have my baby?"

Admittedly, it's a little ridiculous, but I'm going to start now to test whether I can make this a part of my routine. Every single time I exit a car, even before this baby is born, I will say that rhyme to myself.