Being Kendra_ Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back - Kendra Wilkinson [85]
There are a lot of freaks out there and I don’t trust the world nowadays. I watch Nancy Grace every night. Hank yells at me for watching it as much as I do and tells me it makes me paranoid. But by watching reports about kids being abducted or women being assaulted, I feel like I’m more aware of what is going on in the world and able to build this protective shell around my family. By being prepared and aware of what is going on around me, I can be the mama bear I need to be. The world is so different from the way it was when we were growing up. We don’t know who’s living next to us anymore, let alone who’s fixing the roof or mowing our neighbors’ lawns. So yes, I’m defensive. Hank thinks that paranoia forces me to lead a little bit more of a sheltered life than is actually healthy, and I need to work on that.
In most of the places we’ve lived over the past year and a half, I didn’t have the balls to go out much with baby Hank and walk him anywhere by myself. Hank always did that. I just didn’t feel safe walking on the street by myself with the baby. Even if I wasn’t famous, never mind the fact that a million naked photos of me are floating around on the Internet, I’d just be some little blond mom walking her baby. There are a lot of creeps out there and I’d be defenseless. Hank—he’s a six-foot-four-inch NFL athlete; I’ll let him take the baby out for a walk. No one’s going to mess with him. It’s so sad, but I just don’t feel safe. You’ll notice that in any of the paparazzi pictures of me and the baby outside, I’m usually with Hank—part husband, part bodyguard.
One of the things that I worry about every night before I go to sleep is whether I’m raising my child to be the best that he can be. I think I am, and I work hard at it. But it’s not always easy and I can’t always say the world caters to my needs. So sometimes you just have to improvise. Life, as we all know, is not perfect, with the neat little front yard and the white picket fence. I worry a lot about safety, and health, and money. When you’ve been in danger of losing all of them or have at any point lived without any of them, you tend to want to protect yourself from that; you never want to go back. I married an NFL athlete, starred in my own hit cable TV show, and had a bestselling book, and during all of that time I basically lived out of a suitcase. So much for the white picket fence. Money can’t buy you happiness and apparently can’t always buy you a place to call home either! But I had my family, and I’ll take that over a stupid fence any day.
While life was really stressful during those times, there are some things we as parents just have to do, those “you just gotta do it” moments of parenthood. One that comes to mind is the night we were sleeping in a hotel and I had to make Hank Jr. sleep in his stroller. Babies can sleep in strollers for a nap, or even a few hours if necessary. In fact the last thing you want to do is have a baby who can only sleep in his crib. You need them to be able to fall asleep anywhere so you can go about your business and not be tied to your home. But I had never put Hank Jr. in a stroller for a whole night’s sleep, from seven P.M. until seven A.M.! Until I had to.
The hotel that we were staying at in Miami during the Super Bowl in 2010 gave us a crib, and it wasn’t exactly something that I would ever put my baby in. Some cribs are cute and safe, some are just temporary pieces of plastic you can live