Blog a la Cart

One nail at a time, James is teaching Addison all about his love of building and constructing and making.

She seems quite intrigued by these lessons and enjoys lending a hand.

Last night, they began creating a banister for our upstairs stairwell. This whole ordeal was prompted by our scariest parenting moment to date, something that transpired in the wee hours of the morning a few nights ago.

Our upstairs hallways is quite compact, and all five rooms open directly onto the stairwell. When purchasing the house, James and I knew what a hazard this posed, particularly to our smaller human dependents. Our first project was to install a railing, as that was glaringly missing from the picture. See evidence of crazy hazardous stairwell below:

We’d been dilly dallying on installing a gate, for as you can see from the pictures, we had a rather odd corner with which to deal when thinking about gate installation. We propped our laundry hamper in the stairwell’s path in the hopes that that would serve as a temporary fix.

And yet, not surprisingly, the inevitable happened. In the middle of the night, Sunny awoke from a scary dream and before either James or I was awake enough to intercept her, she made her way from her bedroom to ours, except she turned one “doorway” too early and found herself tumbling down a full flight of stairs rather than into bed with mommy and daddy.

You guys? The sound of her screams and her body bouncing down that stairwell will haunt me for eternity. I can feel the hair on the back of my neck rising and my stomach churning just reliving the situation. Just envisioning how truly catastrophic it could have been. We are so so so SO stupidly fortunate that besides taking years off of our lives with fright, Sunny was completely unharmed.

DO NOT ASK ME HOW.

By the time James and I made it to the stairwell and turned on the light, she was standing at the bottom of the stairs, crying, but standing, holding her blanket, looking around like how in the heck did I wind up down here?

I scooped her into my arms and sobbed right along with her. Grateful that she was unharmed. And embarrassed and mortified that our own procrastination had put our daughter at such risk.

#parentingfail

Since then we’ve been gating her into her bedroom at night, which she HATES. It has turned bedtime into a total nightmare, but we keep explaining that it is for her own safety. Last night, James rounded up some scrap wood from the barn and constructed a funky, shabby chic banister on which we’ll attach a proper safety gate.

Please note that this Instagram was taken, with love, from the porcelain throne. We’re multitaskers chez Cart.

Sunny absolutely delights in assisting with the project.

Almost as much as she delights in telling other people about her dramatic fall down the stairs. Her favorite part of the story is when she announces, “And Mommy screamed, OH JESUS! OH JESUS!”

Ya know, I could have screamed something much worse. Brava me for watching my language in a moment of utter panic.

Images of the completed project forthcoming…

Photos: Courtesy of Ashley Weeks Cart