A mom went to go and check on her sleeping baby when she saw something that made her heart stop.
Shayna Babb posted a reel on Instagram (@the.medical.mamas), recounting how she nearly missed a silent choking hazard in her 10‑month‑old son Parker’s crib.
Shayna, who is also mom to Riley and Brayden with husband Taylor, put Parker down for his morning nap around 10:40 a.m. She turned on the monitor and went downstairs to spend time with her other two children.
By 12:15 p.m., she noticed that Parker was still asleep. “[This] was unusual since he normally wakes up on his own,” Shayna told Newsweek, so she decided to go upstairs and wake him.
When she walked into his room, he looked so peaceful that she thought it would be sweet to record him waking up. That moment didn’t last long.
“The moment I moved the camera closer, I noticed black smudges all over his crib and face—and my heart instantly dropped,” Shayna said. She scooped up her son and underneath his chest found an artificial olive from a fake tree that had been in his room since birth.
Sometime during his nap, she guessed Parker had silently woken up, crawled over to the tree, pulled off an olive and started chewing on it. The dark residue was everywhere.
The olive itself was cracked open—“the exact size that could have completely occluded his airway,” Shayna explained in her Instagram reel.
What terrified her most was the silence. “Not once did I hear a sound on the monitor. No fussing. No crying. Nothing,” she wrote. By sheer luck, Parker had spit the olive out and fallen back asleep.
The reality of what could have happened hit her all at once. “In my mind, this was the kind of story you read in a headline,” Shayna said.
The moment was especially sobering because of her background. Just hours earlier, she had finished teaching a CPR and choking course through The Medical Mamas, the education platform she founded to help families handle medical emergencies.
“As a nurse, it was deeply humbling. And as a mom, it was sobering,” she said. “If this could happen to me—a trained medical professional—it can happen to anyone.”
Shayna immediately removed the plant, moving it to her bedroom completely out of reach. Now, she hopes parents take one key lesson from her experience: accidents don’t always come from carelessness.
“You can be the most ‘qualified’ parent, and things can still happen,” she said. “Grace goes a long way. So does forgiveness. And second chances mean everything.”
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