No, this post isn’t about the recent recommendation that children remain in rear-facing car seats until they are two years old.  Don’t get me started on that…

This is about a recent experience I had that I need to share with everyone, because honestly, it really scared me.

A couple weeks ago Alethea received some Mylar balloons.  She enjoyed playing with them in her bedroom.  Then she kind of forgot about them, and there they floated, up on her ceiling for several days.

Then one night last week when Peter was watching the girls, he was putting Lydia down for a nap, when suddenly he heard Alethea yelling in her room.  He went in to find that she had climbed up on her toy storage cubes and flipped on the switch for the ceiling fan.  The fan had gotten up to speed and then sucked in the balloon bouquet.  Alethea was distraught, but Peter managed to untangle everything and both the balloons and the fan were fine.

Now you’d think that after Peter related the incident to me one of us would have said, “Hey, don’t you think we should take the balloons out of her room?” but we didn’t.  I guess I just figured Alethea was upset enough about it that she wouldn’t turn the fan on again.

Well, I was wrong.  On Monday morning I was changing Lydia’s diaper and I thought Alethea was reading books in her room.  Suddenly, Alethea came charging through the doorway shouting, “Fan! On! Fan! On!”

I knew in that instant that I only had seconds to act before the balloons were once again hopelessly tangled in the fan.  I ran to the doorway of Alethea’s room, but just as I hit the switch, I watched helplessly as two balloons were sucked into the fan and went around and around and around.

And then it happened, just as I thought the crisis was almost at an end, the heavy glass globe in the center of the fan came loose and fell to the floor with a huge THUD.

Now, I don’t know exactly how the balloons spinning around tangled in the fan blades managed to unscrew the globe so quickly.  Maybe it had already been loosened by their previous encounter, who can say, but I do know that if Alethea had been underneath that fan instead of safe by my side watching from the doorway, at best she would be in the hospital right now.  And I can’t even bring myself to type the worst.

I’ve learned my lesson.  Balloons that enter our house will no longer be allowed in any room that has a ceiling fan.

And just because I know not everyone will have time to read this rather long post, I’ve created a handy graphic to summarize: