Lost child, lost minutes

Beloved had an incident. I wanted her to write about it in her own words, a guest post, but she's not showing any enthusiasm. I will relay things as best I understand them and let her add an account if she chooses.

They went for morning tea at Beloved's place of work, an event that included one of Bear's peeps, the daughter of Beloved's workmate, who is a few months older than Bear and accordingly gets lots of Bearmiration. They played well, apparently, while the adults yarned about their corporate stuff and traded gossip.

Time to go, and the girls ran ahead together as the group walked along the hall, apparently just a couple of metres in front. Beloved rounded a corner to see that the lift door was wide open and the girls had entered it in anticipation. The doors shut at that exact moment.

The girls screamed "Mummy mummy" and the lift moved off somewhere. The mums rightly felt a bit terrified and one set off for the ground floor while the other ran floor-to-floor checking each.

Meanwhile in the basement the janitor got a surprise when the lift he'd called arrived, the doors opened, and 2 toddlers stared at him in teary disbelief!

Things were quickly rectified.

It just goes to show that every time you start taking on board the idea that you can return to even partial sanity and stop being a complete safety freak, something will happen to scare the complete and undiluted crap out of you.

I was supportive and understanding. I know any lessons there have already been learned. If lifts had an overide-open button, if they didn't shut quite so quickly, if, if... it's yet another example of how so much of the environment around us is utterly child-unfriendly, and how as a parent you have to operate on zero trust for those around to have ever taken into account the assymetric risk that is constituted by a momentarily freed child.

As for Bear, she thought it was all an adventure, especially given she was with her idolised slightly-older pal. She was more than happy to brag to me when I got home...