Done Worse

If you’ve seen the news over the past few days then you’ve probably seen that a crazy man walked into the Holocaust Museum on Wednesday and started shooting. Fortunately the other guards were able to subdue him. Unfortunately not until after he shot a guard who later died from the injuries. A horrible situation all around.

Why am I bringing this all up?

I work in the main USDA building across the street from the Holocaust Museum, and Jackson’s daycare is in the building next to the Museum.  In late morning on Wed, I started hearing helicopters. Only government helicopters are allowed to fly over USDA (and they normally don’t). Something was up. During staff meeting in my boss’s office, USDA IT sent out alert messages that there was a “situation” at the Holocaust Museum. I started panicking  – no parent wants to hear that their kid is next to a “situation”. I must have turned pale, because my boss told me to leave the meeting and call daycare.  I got through right away and was assured that everyone was fine. The whole building was under lockdown – no one was getting in or out, and Jackson was happily sitting in the corner playing. Whew.

As the afternoon progressed we started to learn more. The gunman had been shot and taken to George Washington University hospital. We continued to hear sirens outside, we saw news media trucks, more helicopters and more chaos. We received a new message that everyone on the wing facing the Museum should leave immediately and go home. It was reassuring that the U.S. Government, DC and USDA had such great and effective emergency response teams. It was, however, NERVE WRACKING that the response seemed to take forever while my baby was locked down – perhaps an indication of more to come?? (Turns out they were checking for explosives in the guy’s car. Fortunately there were none.)

Mike and I called back and forth with updates. Our original plan had been that I would go swimming and Mike would bring the boy home. This was no longer viable. The 14th Street bridge between Mike’s office and AJ’s daycare was closed, the street in front of daycare was obviously closed and traffic was already nightmarish at 3:00. It wasn’t hard to imagine what it would be like at quitting time. We came to the conclusion that when we could get the boy out, I should be the one to bring him home.

Why was this a problem, you ask?

Since I wasn’t planning to bring him home, I didn’t have any way to get him home. The boy is now 20 lbs 7 oz and almost 30 inches tall. Also, he likes to bend sideways and try to reach out and grab anything he thinks he has a chance at getting. So you’re walking along… and suddenly he dives to the side and his arms shoot out – really awesome when you’re trying to keep your balance and not keel over sideways or careen into walls. It’s not exactly the easiest task to carry him great distances – especially considering I was going to take the Metro, involving escalators and massive crowds.

Now I had two stresses: getting him out of the situation safely, and then getting him home without injuring any of the parties involved.

At 4:30, the DC police escorted all of the kids to the lunchroom in my building. I raced downstairs to find a lunchroom full of small children doing pretty much what you’d think a lunchroom full of small children would do. Chaos! The kids from the infant room were all clustered together, and I saw AJ in a glass crib on wheels -not unlike a fish in a tank- happily looking around the room.

On the plus side, the boy was safe and we could now go home. On the minus side, we still lacked a baby locomotion device.

Mike and I use those cloth recyclable grocery bags for shopping and carrying around the vast quantities of crap we seem to always need for the boy. If I can carry a 10 lb bag of flour and other groceries around in the bag, why not a 20 lb baby?

And so the ‘baby in bag’ concept was created. Or, you could say Jackson had his first run as a bag-man.  His initial reaction to being put in the bag was “what is this crap?” Fortunately this was quickly followed by his second reaction of “whatever”. While seated he was tall enough to peek out the top and check things out. The metro went pretty smoothly. I heard a few people exclaim “she’s got a BABY in her bag!!!!”  but most people didn’t notice since, let’s face it, it’s not really something you look for. I knew it couldn’t be that uncomfortable, because he fell asleep.

While we have no photos of the actual trip home, we do have photos of a re-creation of the event we did last nite. Enjoy!