Luckily, I was bitten by a radioactive nephew

I can tell young parents just by looking at their eyes. They’re a strange combination of tired and alert. Kids take up a lot of energy, and you’ve got to watch them like hawks because they have a knack for putting themselves in all kinds of dangerous situations.

(There’s a Dennis Miller joke in which he says that parenting is so tough that the only reason God got to rest on the seventh day is because He sent His kid to live with another family.)

Apparently, being an uncle also gives you “toddler sense”, a knack for knowing when a kid is about to put himself or herself in peril.

Two Saturdays ago, I biked to Henry’s — Accordion City’s premier camera store — to purchase my super-nifty Nikon Coolpix SQ. After buying the Coolpix, I lingered in the store for a while, thinking that the rain would stop coming down in buckets shortly. Half an hour later, the torrent was finally beginning to show some signs of letting up enough for me and my camera — in my knapsack, protected by three layers of plastic shopping bags — to head home. I stood in the little covered doorway of the store’s entrance, waiting a little longer and watching the rain subside.

I was standing there daydreaming, half-noticing a toddler — perhaps three or four years old — playing with the automatic door. He’d step towards it and watch it open, then run away from it to let it close.

He then decided to walk towards the door and stay there. It opened all the way. He then stuck his arm in the gap between the door and frame, where the hinges were. He was so close to the doorway that he was out of the door’s sensor range, and like a good automatic door, it started to close.

Toddler sense…tingling!

A fraction of a second later, it dawned on me that this big glass and steel door was going to crush this kid’s arm like a nutcracker crushes walnuts. I don’t remember actually diving for the door — I just remember suddenly being right at the door, holding it open, and pulling the kid’s arm away.

“Don’t put your arm there! You could’ve been hurt!” I scolded the kid.

(I can imagine my friends having trouble picturing me as “adult supervision”. It happens sometimes.)

The kid’s mother, who was busy attending to his younger brother in the store, saw all this. She snatched the kid from the doorway and brought him to his father, who’d been eyeing the display racks. With no one in the range of the door’s sensors, the door closed, with me outside and the kid and his family inside. The father was checking his kid’s arm and the mother was scolding him.

I waved and said “Uh, you’re welcome” to them, but they were oblivious. Ah, well. They can’t take away the “warm fuzzy” that small-scale superheroism gives you.

If being an uncle has sped up my reflexes this much, I can’t imagine how fast my sister — with Aidan reaching his “terrible twos” and Nicholas a few months old — must be.

I’ll bet she can catch bullets with her teeth.