Children are terrifying

I'm fairly certain I lost a couple years off my life expectancy yesterday. I ran outside to let the dog out in this lovely 20 degree weather and heard "Hey! Hi Mommy" a little too clearly considering the fact my kids were inside playing in Bailey's bedroom when I walked out the door. I looked up and time, like the weather, was frozen.

Bailey had managed to unlock and open her bedroom window. She had never even tried in the past, so I didn't realize how much I should have been worried. For those of you who haven't seen my house, her bedroom is upstairs, overlooking a nice, solid, concrete block that is a back porch, a fact which was the first to pop in my mind as my babies pressed their sweet faces against the screen to get a better look below.

As an added bonus, which I once thought was a really great selling point to the house, there is built-in storage below each upstairs window, giving each one a sort of window-seat that my babies were sitting on as they pressed against the screen that has likely been there since the house was built 34 years ago.

I screamed at them to close the window, a panicky, please-God-let-them-listen scream and turned to run inside. As soon as I got to the door to the house, I thought, "I'm not going to make it." I broke land-speed records and am pretty sure I came as close as I ever will to flying down the steps in the garage, up the steps to the mid-level and again up the steps to the upstairs. I grabbed them both off the windowsill (my adrenaline-filled body didn't even notice the 70 pounds worth of kids I had in my arms), squeezed them like you can only imagine before laying Bailey on her bed and yelling in a voice that I wouldn't even recognize if I heard it played back to me.

I took a few minutes to calm down before going back into her room to talk to her. She didn't understand why it was dangerous and asked about a million questions and didn't understand why I had yelled at her when I was scared. She said "You're supposed to cry if you're scared." I did my best to explain to my 5-year-old that scared and angry sometimes go together and cause the strangest responses.

Some of those responses didn't even make sense to myself. For example, why did I run upstairs instead of staying below the window just in case? All I know is that there was a fear so deeply rooted of losing my babies that my mind didn't function how I would have expected looking back on the situation. At the time, it made perfect sense and I knew I was going to save them from the fall, but afterwards, it seems absurd that I thought I could.

All I know now is that I am grateful for today, and every day I get to squeeze these little people. They are my world.