Parenting is chock-full of sudden occurrences like this.
My son wakes up at 6am to prepare for school. My daughter, who was supposed to wake up one hour later, woke up a few minutes after her brother.
There was no time to waste. If I allowed my daughter to remain awake, my wife would be grouchy because that’s an additional hour of caregiving responsibility.
So, I shooed my daughter back into the bedroom. Laid down beside her. I felt confident that she would fall asleep sooner or later.
I waited patiently for about ten minutes. Success! She slumbered again.
Feeling proud of myself because this could only be done when I have a good grasp of my daughter’s behavioral patterns!
I was on the upper deck of a bus that was about to stop. As I got up I told my 2yo and 4yo to hold on, but my 2yo got up anyway and walked to the stairs in front of me while I collected our bulky bag from the seat.
Then the bus stopped, and my son went head first towards the stairs.
Hands full and unable to reach him, I stuck out a leg and caught him by the belly with my foot, which gave me enough time to grab the back of his shirt.
Averted a trip to the hospital.
I had one of those, but it was my older daughter as a 5 year old in a pool suddenly was going under water without noise and I was the only one who noticed. Cleared a table and three people in a half-second and got her before she made it to the bottom of the pool. Scared the shit out of me.