Stuck

We had a little crisis over here last night. Nothing too major, everyone is fine but I guess it is just one of those things that new parents need to go through.....

The night started out normal enough, I gave Grace her bottle and then put her down for bed. She seemed a little more wired than normal so I assumed that it was going to take her a little while to fall to sleep as it sometimes does. So I headed downstairs to check my email and listened to her babble for about 10 minutes on the baby monitor. After a few more minutes the babbling turned into whining and then a bit of crying so Jen decided to head up and check on her.

As soon as Jen got upstairs she yelled down to me to come upstairs. Before I even was on the stairs she was calling me again, pretty frantically this time so I knew something was up. When Jen got upstairs she found Grace with one of her legs stuck past her knee through the slats in the front of the crib. She wasn't too upset at this point she just kept repeating "stuck stuck stuck". Jen and I both tried to pull her leg out but it was indeed stuck.

So we tried moving Grace into different positions but it wasn't coming out without hurting her. The more we tried to move her the more upset she got. Grace is normally not a crier so we knew she must have been in pain and we felt pretty helpless that we couldn't get her leg out for her. Luckily her legs aren't as chubby now as they were before she started walking but there is still enough girth there that we weren't going to just be able to pull it out.

My first inclination was to just break the slats of of the crib but Jen talked me out of that which is a good thing as I probably would have hurt her by splintering the wood. So we decided to try get her pants off to give us some room to work with. Getting her pants off was not so easy at this point as she was was crying as hard as we have ever seen her cry. We briefly considered cutting her pants off her but figured that may upset her more. After a minute we were able to finally get her pants off and saw her poor little leg starting to get all red and bruised from all of our pushing and pulling. Jen ran into the bathroom and got a soapy cloth to lube up her leg and we were finally able to slide her leg back through. Once she was out Grace and Mommy had a good cry but luckily no damage was done. The whole incident probably only lasted a couple minutes but it felt much longer to us, there is nothing worse than seeing your baby in pain.

After the fact we realized that this incident was reminiscent of a conversation we had in China with a couple families in our travel group. I don't exactly remember the context of the conversation but it had something to do with us imagining bathing Grace in a sink and her sizable hips getting stuck. Our overtired minds for some reason found immense humor in the need to butter her thighs to get her out. Who would of thought that almost one year later we would need to butter (or soap up) Grace's thigh because she was stuck in her crib.