When Your Baby Falls off the Bed

It was a typical quiet evening in the Davidescu household. Elizabeth was getting the bath ready for our son Chaim (who goes by Chaim, Chaim Yosi, and Chaim Yosef — that’s a lot of names for someone who just hit eight months!) and meanwhile I was getting him ready by taking off his day clothing and picking some pajamas for him. I had him laying on his back on our bed and went to get a set of pajamas for him when all of a sudden I heard a loud THUMP sound from behind me, followed immediately by a loud screaming cry — the likes of which I had never heard before and hope to never hear again.

I turned around and there was Chaim on the ground, having taken a belly flop right off the bed somehow — I did not see the action that led to his taking the fall but it happened in the blink of an eye.

I ran over and swept him up off of the ground (I wish I could say that I lined the floor with cushion as did that one family who bought a castle in Western Europe — I forget where I read about that but it was a laugh at the time) and he was a mess of tears, sobbing intensely. My wife was showering at the time and she heard it and yelled out to me and I brought him in and told her what had happened and she yelled at me, rightfully so, for being so neglectful.

We turned to two sources. Firstly we tried calling his pediatricians but it turned out that they were on holiday that evening. We called the emergency pediatrician and thankfully he was there. I explained that I did not think that he had hit his head when he fell and that it seemed to be more of a belly flop — there were no injuries to his head that we could assess and his quickness in crying was actually a good sign — he was able to quickly articulate the pain meaning that the brain was probably not negatively affected.

He gave us a list of things to watch out for — specifically nausea, vomiting, and lethargic behavior. It turns out that by the following morning everything was pretty much back to normal for young Chaim Yosef but I stayed home from work anyhow just to make sure that he was okay.

Now that we have gone through things, I am considerably more careful in every manner — sometimes to the annoyance of my wife! I just want to make sure that he could not possibly get injured in a worse way, G-d forbid, if it is in my power to prevent such an accident from happening. Let this be a lesson to you, new parents and soon to be parents (and even eventually to be parents…) there will come a time when you will not just be able to leave your baby on his or her back. He will scramble up and if there is no fence, that seemingly safe bed can become a menace. Be careful!