Within just a few weeks of Steven being born, I was losing it! Every day was so hard trying to take care of a new baby and keep an eye on Todd. If I was feeding the baby, I would deadbolt all the doors and check around the house to make sure I couldn't see any obvious areas Todd could get hurt. It wasn't long before Todd could unlock any door and any deadbolt. It seemed as though at least once a day I would our 5 year old yell that Todd had escaped. He loved to run and as soon as he got out the door he would run as fast as he could to a neighbor and ring her doorbell frantically hoping to get in her house before I could get him. Luckily, this was a good friend and she was very aware of Todd so she would call me and tell me he was safe.

I also got very good at differentiating between Ricky's 'fun' screams and his 'something is very bad' screams. While I was nursing I heard a scream from downstairs and I knew immediately that Todd was in trouble and I ran. I arrived at a bedroom and the mattresses had been pulled off the bunk bed. I found Todd hanging with his neck between the slats of the top bunk. That was terrifying and I wondered if I keep him alive. Unfortunately, that wouldn't be the last of his hangings. While playing outside on the deck, I looked out and couldn't see Todd. I ran out to find that somehow, Todd had managed to crawl between the outdoor deck stairs and get his neck caught in between the stairs. The scariest hanging of all was when he was playing downstairs and climbing along a shelf that ran around the windows. He decided he was Peter Pan and took of to fly. He managed to get caught on the levelor cord which wrapped around his neck. He had a deep cut on his neck that had started to bleed. I was sick to my stomach. But I went around the house and cut the cords on all our levelors so that could never happen again.