kids are grey hair generators

My daughter was less than a month old when she scared the living daylights out of me, triggering the first of my many gray hairs.
I was holding her when I realized I needed to go tend food in the kitchen. I quickly spread out a blanket and laid her on the floor in front of our antique desk.
When I returned, only the baby blanket remained on the floor. I stared at the blanket in shock until a whimper and tiny sleeper-clad foot, peaking out from under the arch of the desk’s wooden scroll work betrayed her hiding place. I managed to nab a hold of her food and gently pull her back. As her head neared the top of the arch, I reached under the desk, turned her head to the side and slid her out. I still find it hard to believe that she not only fit, but wiggled her way under that desk.
When I had a houseful of two step-sons and three birth sons, a mother with a similar family empathetically told me she had lived on automatic after her fourth child was born. She threw laundry in the machines, meals on the table and kicked toys out of her was as she returned the baby to his bed with a nap.
She said, “I woke up the day I caught myself putting the baby in the refrigerator after I had laid the bottle in the bassinet for a nap.” She swapped the baby for the bottle and gained another gray hair. The bigger and more mobile children become the more gray hairs we get.
A co-worker said he was supervising his 18-month-old daughter while his wife was out. The doors were closed, the house was childproof, he knew she was safe. He was working on the computer when his wife tapped him on the shoulder. “Where is our daughter?”
“She’s around here somewhere,” he shrugged.
“Where?”
“Where could she go? She’s here in the house.”
He pushed back his chair and looked around the room. She wasn’t there. Nor was she in the bedrooms, the kitchen or the dining room. It was an hour before he and his wife found their toddler curled up behind the couch sleeping on her pillow, oblivious to her parent’s frenzied search.
Been there, done that.
I thought our son was out playing with the neighbors when I called him in to eat. He didn’t respond. My husband looked around our small yard and didn’t find him.
We walked up and down the block asking if the neighbors had seen him. He wasn’t down the street near the old railroad station, nor hiding in the little cemetery plot at the other end of the street.
My husband said, “If someone kidnaped him for money, they chose the wrong family. W don’t have any.”
Frightened, hating to admit we had not watched that kid every minute, we went to our bedroom to sit down on the bed and rocking chair and figure out what to do next and three he was sleeping like a baby in our old swivel rocking chair which he had turned away from the door.
It was about an hour before my heart recovered and was as relaxed as he was, but I’ll never recover the year’s growth he scared out of me or be rid of those additional gray hairs.