First run in with the police, age 4 years 4.5 months.

So, the Boy was given into the care of The Girl for large portions of yesterday - she was on her bike keeping an eye on him while he was on his trike riding up and down the sidewalk. We DID swap off and one of us would watch him and follow him for a while, but walking up and down the damn street over and over at fast-trike-speed was killing us (me and Jo). Toward the end of the day, apparently we shouldn't have made her take him for that last round. She (and her buddy) sent Nate back to the house on his trike with a dandelion for Daddy, and never made sure he got here. He was completely unaccounted for for close to 40 minutes. About 10 minutes after we realized he was gone (and we'd been running around the neighborhood searching), we'd (Matt, me, Josh) just gotten into cars and were pulling out when the police showed up. He was on the other side of the Street (it's a horseshoe) at a neighbor's house, and they'd called the police about him. Matt actually found him before the police got to that house, and stayed to talk with the officers about it.

She's grounded for a week, however one of the things we discussed was that if she's burned out on watching him - and we're not noticing - she needs to speak up and let us know. She was pretty upset when the gravity of the situation hit her, and we talked about the bad outcomes that SHE had thought of (I tend to NOT insert my own fears into her imagination - it's bad enough on it's own). We also identified the point at which she screwed up, and that was when she sent him back to the house and did not make sure he got to us (not just in the vicinity of the house). Included in the post mortem is the issue with us having allowed him to ride his trike up to either end of the street with supervision - he got a little too overconfident, overly independant and did it without supervision. AND THEN there was the fact that I'd thought about applying (and obviously DIDN"T) one of his Safety-Tat's with our phone numbers on it. Which the neghbors could simply have called if it were on him.