A Belfast mum has warned others to be vigilant after her two-year-old daughter had a near miss with window blind cords in her bedroom.
Her mother Lisa McKernan had put the little girl and her other children down to bed one night and decided to take a bath about an hour later.
She was in the bathroom, she said, when she heard a loud bang and crying.
“I ran in and saw Ellen holding her throat and crying – it didn’t even sound like her at all,” she told The Belfast Telegraph.
Lisa’s son told her the toddler had been playing with the blinds in her bedroom.
“I took her hand away from her throat which is when I saw all the claw marks, a big red ring round her throat,” she said.
“Then it hit me; she’d been hanging from it and managed to crawl free and the bang was her hitting her head on the corner of the bed.
“There was blood all over my hands, but thankfully she was OK. If she hadn’t hit the bed I wouldn’t have been alerted to it until I was out of the bath.”
Lisa said that she cut every blind cord in the house that night and has been shaken by the incident since.
She advised other parents to check their homes for anything that might pose a threat to small children.
“Really, what you need to do is walk around your house looking at everything through a child’s eyes,” she said.
The Competition and Consumer Protection Agency has also warned that blind cords can be a strangulation danger to young kids.
On its website, it’s urged parents to move any furniture away from windows and keep cords and chains out of reach.
You can learn more about blind safety in this video.
