9 lives

it's almost halloween, so allow me to scare you. god knows the incident i'm about to recap was so crap-in-the-pants frightening there's enough yikes to go around.
a few weeks ago tayloe, thomas, below mentioned johnny and i went for a walk along the river. beautiful day, happy boys, wet dog - life was fine. and then everything wasn't.
thomas was in the stroller and johnny was off his leash retrieving tennis balls. tayloe was tagging along behind collecting sticks and walnuts. with an arm full, he asked me to stop and help him. i took my hand off the stroller to turn around and see what exactly he needed and in that moment, johnny's wet seeming 1,000 lb tail whopped the stroller and sent it rolling down the riverbank and plunging into the cool early october waters. i hadn't put the foot break on.
t2 screamed, i screamed, thomas screamed and as i ran down the bank after it i watched as the stroller, with our 13 month old baby strapped into it, sunk into chilly early october river water. i dove in but struggled to pull the stroller up and flip it over. maybe it was tayloe's shrieks from the side. maybe it was just pure adrenaline. the only thing i could think to do was dive under and shove it up from underneath. so i did. it bobbed (no pun intended. at all. although that is kinda funny) to the surface and there was my baby boy, drenched and shivering and shrieking, but very much alive. little tayloe was very much alive too, sobbing from the shore and yelling 'my baby brother, my baby brother!' i'd say, 'it's OK, he's OK,' & he'd sob back , 'mama he's NOT OK. he's SOAKING WET.' well yes, there's that.
what happened after that is kind of a blur of panic. i ran everyone back to the truck, cranked the heat and had them both in a hot bath in what seemed like minutes. as quickly as it had happened it was over and everything was back to normal.
except for me. tayloe came in from his office and said i looked like i'd seen a ghost. a ghost that tried to drown me. and maybe rip my heart out.
even after thomas was warmed up, in pjs and tucked into bed, i couldn't stop imagining what he would have looked like if he'd stopped breathing. i imagined what i'd of done, how absolutely positively dreadful it all could have gone. sometime around 1 a.m. i snuck into thomas' room, snuggled him in my arms and sat with him in the dark for nearly an hour.
because everything is ok and i eventually was able to get the shocking images out of my mind, i can look back on it with a little humor. no one else was around, but had they been the scene surely would have looked like a total cluster *&uck. a baptism gone terribly, terribly wrong. for days after t2 told everyone he saw that his baby brother rolled down the hill in his stroller and landed in the river. nice.
my iphone, which was in the strollers' cup holder, went dead for 2 days and then slowly came back to life. still, it shows signs of trauma. when i try to open certain applications it tries, blinks a few times and then goes black. i can almost hear it saying, 'hey lady, i've got your facebook status update: 'put the f'ing foot break on!'
and i rue the day when thomas tells me he's been having water submersion nightmares. and then rolling down a hill uncontrollably nightmares. and then soaking wet & freezing nightmares. and when all of this comes after we've just gotten over the you hate me and are trying to kill me nightmares.
when i look at this pic, taken by my mother in law this weekend, i see sweet smiling alive thomas and i feel overwhelmed with relief and joy and love.
that's my thomas. toughest kid on the block.