You may not be aware of my absolute hatred of mini-blinds; but I do hate them with a passion. Our old house had no mini-blinds. I removed them all after having Madelyn, because of the strangulation danger. Well, when we moved into our current house...we had a lot more windows and no curtains to cover them. So going against every motherly instinct I have I left the mini-blinds. But to make myself feel better, I did cut all the strings to the top so that they would not be dangling down, except when the blinds are up (which I never put them up). I did eventually find curtains, never really found ones I loved so I settled for sheers. As you all know sheers are transparent, so unless I wanted the whole neighborhood looking in the windows...I had to keep the blinds or find an alternate. So we have lived peacefully in the house this way for 20 months. SIGN 1: Then while jumping on her brother's bed, Madelyn sliced two of her fingers on the mini-blinds in Christians room. Not sure if it was on the strings or the blinds themselves because in the process two slates were broken. She probably could have used stitches in the one finger, but I weighed the options and thought a little bit wider scar on the finger compared to the trauma of another shot and stitches (not to mention getting them removed) I decided to steri-strip it and call it good. By the way...it healed nicely, not sure it will really scar at all.
SIGN 2: Then we come to yesterday....Scott saw a red mark on Madelyn's neck and he asked her what she did to get that. She said "I wrapped the mini-blinds cord around my neck". I FREAKED!!!! Needless to say, we made a trip to Lincoln and bought new curtains for the entire house. And all the mini-blinds have been removed and thrown away. Because I refuse to sell them on a garage sale for some other family with kids to put up in their house.
Yesterday just confirmed to me that I should NEVER go against my "Motherly instinct". Thank God the big guy upstairs gave me two signs to fix the problem!!! And that I am just talking about a rope burn and not something devastating.
You may wonder why I had the hatred in the first place, well a woman came to speak at my "mom's group" when I lived in Lincoln. She walked into her living room to find her four-year-old son hanging from the mini-blind cord. Luckily the father was able to perform CPR and he survived. But when she was talking, she spoke of other cases that were not such happy endings. The one that terrified me the most of a 11 year old boy that was found dead in his bed. The mini-blind cord must have been close to his bed and through the process of tossing and turning while sleeping that night he strangled himself. Can you imagine 11 years old?!?!?!?!
That's it...I am off my soap box.
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