Hello, readers! How was your Thanksgiving? I spent mine with the in-laws, relatively drama free, while my husband was in North Dakota telling his jokes and singing shitty karaoke songs.
What neither of us did over the holiday was rescue a trapped child from a laundry chute.
Ooooh- look! Fox news! Proving that little kid stories are universal.
Apparently, little Cayden was super curious about the laundry chute and decided to take a closer look. Maybe he thought it would be like those adventure movies where you slide down the long cave slide til you get to the hidden treasure. Maybe he’s a super nerd kid and wanted to play Star Wars. Whatever the reason, 2 year old Cayden opened the laundry chute door, and fell about 20 feet into a bunch of cables that were being stored in the chute, getting tangled up and unable to move.
Eventually, fire fighters were able to rescue little Cayden, who came away from the experience with little more than a couple of bumps and scrapes. One of the first things Cayden did was try to open the chute door again, but his parents had nailed it shut.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. What kind of shitty parent wouldn’t have done that in the first place? I admit, it was kind of my first thought. But then I remembered a time when Jared was two and had, in the space of about 5 seconds, managed to go from the ground to the top of a stack of benches, about 7 feet up in the air. To this day, I have no idea HOW he managed it. Point is, 2 year olds are freaky fast. If you take your eyes off of them for even a second, they’ll end up on the other side of the room, ready to do something incredibly dangerous and scare you half to death.
They’re like the most adorable Weeping Angels ever.
Don’t blink. Don’t even blink.
Anyway, although nailing down the laundry chute door seems like a no-brainer after the fact, we have to award the father massive kudo parenting points. Upon hearing the frightened screams of his child, locating him, and wanting to comfort him, Cayden’s father PUNCHED A HOLE IN THE WALL so he could hold his son’s hand til help arrived. In fact, Dad broke his hand and is probably going to need surgery.
He totally wins The Most Bad-ass Dad in Recent News award. Do you know who doesn’t get a good parenting award? This person:
[youtube=http://youtu.be/4U32s8G33r8]
There’s no sound, so if you have your audio off at work, you’re not missing anything. For those who can’t watch the video, let me describe it for you. From a security camera: a little girl and her older brother go up to one of those stuffed animal claw games. No parents in sight, but maybe they’re off camera. The little girl decides she wants a stuffed animal, and amazingly crawls up into the vending machine through the prize door. And then her parents, oblivious to the fact that she is missing, WALK RIGHT BY THE MACHINE AND OUT THE DOORS.
Big brother has to go get his mom TWICE before she notices that her daughter is not only missing, but inside a vending machine. She casually puts down her coffee before trying to rescue her daughter. I mean, she doesn’t even seem worried. Once the child is retrieved, Mom collects her coffee and sets down the little girl. Because priorities. If it were me, I’d still be clinging to my little boy 10 years later, and I’d have forgotten all about the coffee.
But you know what the biggest shame is? That little girl didn’t even get a stuffed animal.
Huh. I don’t suppose it would have ever occured to me to nail a laundry chute door shut for fear some kid would crawl into it. Then again, i’d probably be actively *using* a laundry chute if i had one, so it wouldn’t occur to me to store cables in it either 😉
For some it would, and others it wouldn’t. Those cables probably broke his fall and prevented further injury.
Our laundry chute is a false drawer in the bottom of a built in. Unfortunately they obvious owners put in a bathroom in a place where anything you drop down the chute would end up inside a wall. Basically I could use it to quickly hide stuff from the authorities, then never retrieve it, because patching drywall is for suckers.
Previous owners, I am the obvious owner…
Did you just tell us where all your black market sequins ended up?
Rhinestones, sequins are basically free. Rhinestones are nickel a piece for the good ones in standard clothing application size.
I’m kind of impressed by the little girl. She *just* fit in that thing and the fact that she had the tenacity and bravery to continue to explore is pretty impressive. Of course, a girl that inquistive and bold needs much more attentive parents, but I’m going to optimistically choose to believe that they learned something from this. (Don’t burst my bubble.)
Right? Also, when she got to the top and just kinda flopped down on the animals like “Fuck you, bitches! I have achieved my reward!” I absolutely love that kid.