We always put them to sleep on their backs, as recommended, even though they sleep better on their stomachs. We don’t even give them any blankets. During the night, we check on them frequently. When I feed them in middle of the night, I make sure to keep myself up, so as not to fall asleep with them in my bed.

Nechemiah and I are insistent that our kids wear bicycle helmets every time they get on their bikes. In our car, there’s no such thing as a young child not sitting in a car seat or booster, even if we’re just going for a short ride. Everyone wears seatbelts — always. Our kids never play outside unsupervised, even though all the neighbors on the block are frum and most of the other parents in our friendly out-of-town community send their kids to play outside without a second thought.

I’m a conscientious mother, the type who calls the babysitter to tell her the baby isn’t feeling well and won’t be coming today, or even that he’ll be arriving a half hour late. Nechemiah is a very involved father, and in some ways he’s even more concerned about the kids’ health and safety than I am. He’s the one who makes sure the kids are always wearing sunscreen before they go out in the sun. He’s the one who hovers over the babies while they eat to ensure they’re not choking. He’s the one who insists on taking the kids to the doctor when they’re a little under the weather and I’m deliberating whether to send them to school.

Each morning, before he leaves to work, Nechemiah helps me get the kids ready for school and onto their school buses. Then I drive the baby, Shimmy, to the babysitter, after which I head to the clinic where I work half a day as a social worker.

Nechemiah works in an insurance office near our house, and most days he walks to work. Occasionally, when he does need the car, he’ll drive me to work and then drop off Shimmy at the babysitter.

One morning this past spring, Nechemiah needed to run some errands, so he drove me to work, after which he continued on with Shimmy. I saw my first client at nine, as usual, and while I was in session, I heard my phone vibrate in my purse. That was odd, because I usually turn my phone off completely before meeting a client. Either way, I ignored the phone; I would never dream of answering my phone while in session. When the phone vibrated again a few minutes later, I again ignored it, making a mental note to myself to check my missed calls before my next session.

When the phone vibrated a third time a few minutes later, my client stopped talking. “Do you need to answer your phone?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling highly embarrassed. “I’ll just turn it off.”

But when I picked up my phone to turn it off, I noticed that the three missed calls were all from Ahuva, my babysitter. After trying to call three times, she had texted me, at 9:54: Hi, is everything okay?

That was odd. Why would Ahuva text me randomly when she knew I was with clients? “Give me a minute,” I said to my client. “It’s my babysitter. I’ll make up the time at the end of the session, I’m really sorry.”

What do you mean? I quickly texted back. I nursed Shimmy at eight.

Her bone-chilling answer came instantly. He’s not here.

What? Where could Shimmy be?

I bolted from the room and down the corridor, without even saying a word to my client. Shaking, I dialed Nechemiah.

“Where’s Shimmy?” I asked.

“Shimmy?” he asked, puzzled. “Um, he’s at the babysitter, no?”

“Ahuva says he’s not there.”

A pause. “Oh, my G-d.”

The next thing I knew, the call ended. I stood there, frozen, picturing Shimmy dead. Or kidnapped.

A minute later, Nechemiah called back, panting. “I left him in the car,” he said.

“Is he alive?”

“Yes, baruch Hashem.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! He’s fast asleep. I’m bringing him to the babysitter now. I can’t believe I forgot him.”

I felt so faint, I couldn’t even walk down the hallway and back into my office. When I spotted my supervisor walking into a nearby room, I called out to her, “Linda, I have an emergency. Can you tell my client that I have to cancel the session?”

I stood there in the hallway, my heart racing, for a few minutes, and then called Ahuva. “Is Shimmy there yet?”

“Yup.”

“How is he?”

“He’s totally fine,” she assured me. “Still fast asleep.”

“Wake him up,” I instructed her. “And please feed him right away. I want to make sure he’s okay. How’s his color?”

“His color is perfect,” she said soothingly. “I’m telling you, he’s fine.”

I couldn’t stop trembling, though. And there was no way I could see my next client. Just then, Linda came over to me and asked, “What’s going on, Sarah?”

I told her what had happened.

“Wow, what a miracle your babysitter called,” she said. “And what a miracle your phone was on!”

“Thank G-d,” I whispered. “But I can’t see another client right now.”

“Go get yourself a coffee,” she urged me. “I’ll tell your next client you had an emergency and had to cancel.”

I went into my office and tried doing some paperwork, but I couldn’t focus. At 10:10, I sent Ahuva another text: I’m still shaking. I can’t work.

She wrote back, Stop. Everything’s good.

An hour later, I finally felt calm enough to see another client. Thankfully, my last client canceled, and I picked up Shimmy at noon. I scooped him up in my arms and couldn’t stop kissing him.

That evening, when Nechemiah returned home, we pieced together what had happened. After he had dropped me off at the clinic, he was supposed to continue driving straight and then turn right at the third corner, heading toward Ahuva’s house. Instead, when he had reached the second corner, he had reflexively turned right, in the direction of our house and his office. Completely forgetting that he had Shimmy in the car, he went home to eat breakfast, after which he drove to the bank. From there, he drove to the supermarket and did some shopping, after which he placed the packages in the trunk and drove to his office, all with Shimmy slumbering peacefully in the back seat.

B’chasdei Shamayim, it was a beautiful morning, not too cold and not too hot, so being left in a car for an hour hadn’t done Shimmy any harm. In hindsight, now that he was safe and sound, we were grateful that our car had tinted windows. Had someone noticed Shimmy in the car and called the police, who knows what could have happened? Nechemiah would likely have been arrested, and Shimmy might have been taken from us. For all we knew, we might have been declared incompetent parents and had all our children removed from our custody!

Nechemiah couldn’t stop excoriating himself for having forgotten Shimmy. “Are you angry at me?” he kept asking me anxiously. “What’s wrong with me? How could I do this? Am I normal?”

“I’m not angry at all,” I soothed him. “It could easily have happened to me, or to anyone.”

My reassurances to Nechemiah notwithstanding, I kept having nightmares, and day horrors, about what could have happened. What if I hadn’t left my phone on that morning? And what if Ahuva hadn’t called to find out where Shimmy was? I would have discovered that Shimmy was missing only in the afternoon when I went to pick him up from Ahuva, and by then the sun would have been directly overhead, beating down on the car, with little Shimmy trapped inside for four hours. The thought was too terrible to contemplate.

Caring babysitter that Ahuva is, she had called not once, but three times, followed by a text, when Shimmy didn’t arrive at his usual time. How many babysitters would do that?

Then again, Ahuva herself told me she wouldn’t have bothered calling most of the other mothers had their babies not arrived.

“Most of the kids I babysit don’t have such a predictable schedule,” she explained. “They don’t show up at the same time every day, and their mothers don’t call if they’re not coming. But Shimmy always arrives before nine, and in all the years I’m babysitting for your kids, it’s never happened that you didn’t call ahead of time to tell me about a change in your baby’s schedule. So I knew something was strange.”

That week, I bought Ahuva a gift to show my appreciation, although it felt woefully inadequate. How do you thank someone for saving your baby’s life?

Now that Shimmy had been forgotten in the car once, I didn’t trust myself to remember to bring him every single day. I, too, could make the mistake of driving directly to work and neglecting to drop off Shimmy, especially if it was a particularly hectic morning or I was running late. Every day after I parked outside the clinic, I kept going back to the car to make sure he wasn’t in there.

Of one thing I was certain: This would never happen again.

The next time Nechemiah needed the car in the morning was three weeks after he had forgotten Shimmy. By then, although the memory of that incident was still fresh in our minds, we were no longer as distressed about it.

That morning, I was doing paperwork, not seeing clients, so I didn’t bother turning off my phone. When my phone vibrated at 9:31, I dashed for it.

It was a text from Ahuva. Shimmy not here.

Again! This time, the feeling of terror was accompanied by a flash of anger at Nechemiah. How could he?

Terror-stricken, I frantically called Nechemiah. He didn’t answer. I dialed again. This time, I heard him panting as soon as he answered. The moment he saw my number at that time of the day, he immediately realized he had forgotten Shimmy, and he sprinted from his office to the parking lot.

“He’s here,” he gasped. “He’s fine.”

It was de ja vu all over again. After dropping me off at work, Nechemiah — who was under a lot of stress at work — had reflexively turned right at the second corner, heading toward his office, instead of continuing to the next corner, in the direction of Ahuva’s house. Again he found Shimmy sleeping peacefully in our minivan. Utterly mortified, he brought him to Ahuva’s house.

If Nechemiah had questioned his own sanity after the first time he left Shimmy in the car, this time around I feared he would have a breakdown, so furious was he at himself for having seriously endangered Shimmy’s life — twice in three weeks. But this time, instead of merely flagellating himself, brooding over what could have been, and declaring that this would never happen again, Nechemiah swung into action mode. He did intensive research into the phenomenon of parents forgetting their children in the car and looked into various ideas and solutions to prevent it from happening again.

From his research, we learned that simply being determined to remember that a child is with you in the car is not enough of a safeguard. Even the most responsible, safety-conscious parents can forget a child, especially when there’s a change in routine, because “habit memory” automatically takes over — which is exactly what happened to Nechemiah.

Nechemiah ordered all sorts of “baby in car” paraphernalia online, and he placed special mirrors in the car facing Shimmy’s car seat, which give the driver a direct view of the baby. We experimented with technological solutions as well, including Waze’s child-reminder feature and car alarms that buzz if a child is left in the car. Another solution Nechemiah came across was to attach a cord from the car key to the baby’s car seat, but that didn’t work for us because our car has keyless ignition. Then there was the idea that the driver should leave his left shoe in the back seat with the baby, but we didn’t think that was practical, especially since Nechemiah wears lace-up shoes.

What he found most effective was making a point of placing his phone into Shimmy’s car seat each time he strapped him in.

“My phone, I won’t forget,” he admitted sheepishly.

As for me, I got into the habit of popping the trunk open every time I leave the car, whether or not I have a child with me, since that forces me to see if there’s a stroller in the trunk — and a baby in the car. I also asked Ahuva to set herself a daily reminder on her phone for 9:15 each morning.

“If Shimmy’s not there by then, please call me and my husband,” I requested.

After each of the two times Nechemiah left Shimmy in the car, he asked me not to tell anyone what had happened. “It’s too embarrassing,” he explained. Knowing how upset he was about it, and how committed he was to ensuring that it wouldn’t happen again, I tried not to talk about it much. But now that some time has passed, he gave me the green light to publicize the story.

“If it saves one baby,” he says, “it will have been worth it.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 718)