I'm suffering with a guilty conscience today which is pretty typical with my record of shoddy motherhood.
My son Bryn is currently teething so cue lots of dribbing , lots of grizzling and not much sleep for me. When he is like this, I can openly admit that he is quite HARD WORK! I know that might be a shock to some of you with your rose tinted specs but motherhood/parenthood is not all smiles and magic moments. In a bid to limit the pain of dealing with a grumpy baby, I elected to take him out to my local playgroup. I always find the company of other bedraggled mothers helps my sanity as I stop thinking I am the only one in this state and can have a good moan about the babies latest misdemeanors.
As usual, I was in a mad rush. Good mothers may be able to get their children out of the house on time, smartly dressed and fully prepared for their trip out but being a bad mutha means that we are constantly running late, in a shabby state and totally unprepared. I quickly shoved baby Bryn in his car seat which is part of his Graco travel system (excellent travel system bought for the princely sum of £10 from ebay- no expense spared for my little cherub!). I then put the car seat into the pushchair in order to make haste down to the car, and didn't really pay much attention to what I was doing as I was too busy shouting expletives at the hubby while frantically looking for my car keys. The journey to my car involves taking the travel system down a small flight of steps at the front of my house. As I clumsily dragged the pushchair down the steps, Bryns car seat suddenly came lose from the pushchair and somersalted down the steps. My heart was literally in my mouth as I saw him flying through the air and land face down on the path. I squealed and ran towards my little angel who was now screaming hysterically but was overcome with relief when I saw that he was ok, apart from being severely traumatised! It turns out that I had failed to click the car seat into place which had led to this terrible example of bad muthahood. This 'bad mutha' really must try harder!
Lessons learnt
- Be organised in the morning so that I am not in a mad rush to get out of the house (realistically never going to happen)
- Always strap baby into his car seat
- Always make sure the car seat is clicked into place before setting off from the house
Anyway, I hope you good mothers are not too shocked by what you have read today. You can now go off and feel rather smug that this would never ever happen to your little angel. I am almost certain that another example of bad muthahood will occur tommorrow (as it does most days) so will be updating my blog with the next incident shortly!
