bearing blog

Not my baby, my friends’ baby.  Three families went camping, we among them, and on the last morning after breakfast, not ten minutes after we’d all agreed that the trip was a resounding success, fifteen-month-old Finnian backed towards the smoldering fire ring; three or four adults yelled "Finnian!"; he jerked his head up; and the momentum knocked him off balance and he tumbled butt-first into the fire.

The next instant stretched on and on as people were reaching and grabbing and pulling him out; it seemed long enough for me, several meters away, to think He’s in the fire, pull him out and then to think He’s still in the fire, why isn’t anyone pulling him out? and then to think He’s still in the fire, he has to come out! But of course it was only a couple of seconds.  And then he was in someone’s arms, and someone, inexplicably, was beating Finnian on the side of the head with a hat, and then it seemed that everyone was shouting, "Water! Water!" and the bucket was empty, and then someone was holding him under the pitifully thinly streaming spigot of our collapsible drinking water container, and then two of the men were running away with him, away down the two-hundred-foot path to the potable-water faucet, and his mother was running behind.  And he screamed and he screamed and he screamed.

It turned out okay in the end.  His ear was blistered and the edges of the peeling blisters blackened.  His hair was singed (that was why he had been beaten with the hat, of course) and the skin was reddened.  After holding him under the faucet for many minutes, his mother took him into her lap and nursed him, and we viewed it as a good sign that he stopped screaming and nursed and calmed.   While he nursed we could inspect and treat the burns we could see.  And then one of the men drove Finnian and his mother to the emergency room and the rest of us started to pack up, talking and talking and thinking how much worse it could have been.  When they returned a couple of hours later, Finnian ran down the path himself.  His head was bandaged and he also had a bandage on his arm (we hadn’t noticed the burn on his arm) but he seemed to have forgotten all about it.

So here’s what went wrong, and here’s what went right.  Wrong first:

• Immediate cause:  The camp chairs were too close to the fire.  After the children went to bed the night before, the adults stayed up and drew the chairs close around the fire.  We’d never put them back, and when Finnian fell he’d been directly between the fire and the feet of an adult seated in one of the chairs.   
• Possibly more important:  We hadn’t worked very hard at keeping the two toddlers aware of the fire.  On previous trips we’d been very vigilant, yanking them away whenever they came near and constantly reminding them "Hot! Hot!"  (Enough so that last year, my then-eleven-month-old started to say "Hot!").  This year, with eight children to keep track of, and none of them ever burned, we got complacent about the fire, even though we were vigilant about the unusually abundant poison ivy and ticks.  These hazards seemed new and interesting; the campfire, not so much.
• We didn’t even catch the cues we were giving each other.  We kept pointing out to each other, "Wow, Finnian keeps getting really close to the fire.  He doesn’t understand it at all."  We kept making jokes about having to file near-miss reports.  And yet, only once the whole trip did anyone try to teach him about it.

Mistakes we made that might have made it much worse, but luckily, didn’t:

• We didn’t have a lot of water handy.  We’d given up on keeping a full bucket of water around because the children kept tipping it over and we were worried about one of them falling in.
• We didn’t know where the closest emergency room was.  They drove him to the nearest town that they guessed would have a hospital, and luckily they were right; and time was not terribly important in this case, but it might’ve been.

What went right, that might not have:

• Finnian was fully dressed except for shoes.  Our little ones aren’t always.  I know my toddler was walking around in nothing but a diaper a few times during the trip.
• We had three fully stocked first-aid kits, one of which contained a wilderness-first-aid manual.
• We got him out of the fire very fast, we knew to apply cold water immediately and for a long time (five to fifteen minutes), and Finnian’s dad thought to run the water over Finn’s entire body instead of just the area that seemed burned.  That was smart, because he did have other burns that didn’t turn red until later.

We resolved to buy a water bucket with a lid, to get some spray chalk to mark a Toddler Exclusion Circle (i.e. if they go inside it we yank them out) around the campfire, to forbid the girls from wearing dresses while camping, and to keep the babies fully dressed.  Of all the things that might’ve gone wrong, I am most haunted by the thought that Finnian might not have had two layers of clothes on.