If you’ve been “reading me” for any length of time then you know that I have a Baby Hawk carrier and that I LOVE it. Even in small town Arkansas, I get compliments on it and I think that it’s damn handy to have both of my hands free so that I can deal with Cara while holding Oliver.
Since my only other experience with a carrier was the ringsling that Tucker made for me when I had Cara, I’m still figuring out what positions are best for carrying Oliver and just how to position the straps and such.
Early on, Oliver slept all of the time. The easiest way to tie him on was with him facing me and his legs curled up. He was perfectly content to sleep the whole time and couldn’t have cared less about what was going on with the world. As he’s gotten older, he’s woken up just a bit and enjoys watching where I’m taking him.
Today we went to Target to buy Christmas presents [can’t tell you what we got since my in-laws read this] and Oliver was particularly “with it”. Having his face in my boobs just wasn’t going to cut it so I turned him around so that his back was to me and tied him in. I used to do that all of the time with Cara and Oliver was digging it.
During the course of our shopping trip, we stopped at Dillards so that Tucker could have the watch bitch lady look at this REALLY nice diving watch that Tucker’s dad had given Tucker. Tucker got the battery changed when we first moved back to Arkansas in June and ever since then the watch has been acting funny and the new battery is already going dead.
As I was chasing Cara around the costume jewelery, I happened to pass one of those floor to ceiling mirrors and I caught a glimpse of Oliver’s feet…which were bright red. His ankels had this weird, scary purple hue to them and I flipped the fuck out. Bear in mind that Oliver was as content as a hog in shit this whole time.
I frantically loosened the straps and yanked Oliver out of the mei tai. I rubbed his feet and legs to get the circulation back and the color returned to normal almost immediately. No harm, no foul but it scared the ever lovin’ hell out of me. It scared me enough to write a post about it so that hopefully no one else will have the same thing happen to their canned ham.
Here’s where I went wrong:
If I had crossed Ollie’s feet infront of him like he was sitting Indian style and then tied him on then things would have been fine. In fact, I’ve done just that on numerous occasions and he’s been happy and his legs were not in danger of losing their very important blood supply.
But this time I left his legs out so that he was straddling what is normally the back of the carrier. Oliver’s a big boy and I didn’t give that positioning a second thought. The problem was that the carrier’s back cut into Ollie’s legs and stopped up his femoral arteries. Hence the blood pooling in his legs and the discoloration.
Everything is back to normal and I’m glad that I caught it when I did. Ollie seems to be 100% a-ok and is currently asleep. I think the only lasting proof of my stupidity will be a couple of minor bruises on his thighs and my pretty obsessive worry about what might have been if I hadn’t walked by that huge ass mirror.
So, after I publish this little ditty, I’m going to go get my Baby Hawk and one of Cara’s “babies” and learn how to tie a kid on my back so that I know that Oliver will be able to see everything AND keep his legs.
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