A Thousand Reasons 10
Her first conscious thought was that there was someone on her bed, she cracked her eye open in time to see Rachel crawling towards her.
Thankfully the small girl's journey was significantly safer these days. After a few occasions of Rachel appearing at the bedside for house to get curious as to how she managed to escape her crib. She returned home from work one evening to find house in Rachel's bedroom with three mini cameras all pointing to the crib from different angles. He spent a further hour rigging them up to a laptop that would record Rachel's every move while they slept. Their timing was perfect as she was just pulling the cannelloni from the oven as he emerged looking very pleased with himself.
It was not until 3 mornings later that Rachel made an early morning entrance into their room. House leapt from the bed and was in Rachel's room before Cuddy had even sat up. This morning Rachel announced that she wanted to read as she crawled in next to he mom. Cuddy glance at the clock 4.37am, ugh. She and house had only settled to sleep around midnight after...stress relief from a tough day. "No Rachel, it's sleeping time." Just as Rachel turned dejectedly back to her room House bustled through the door, laptop tucked under one arm and grabbing Rachel with the other as he hustled past her on his way back to the bed.
"OK shorty time to find out how you do it." He bellowed with excitement as he plopped both of them onto the bed. He flipped the laptop open and navigated his way to the saved video footage. He scrolled back 10 minutes to see Rachel squirming around in her crib. Both adults then watched in awe as Rachel acrobatically reached up to the bar across the top of the crib and swung, clung and climbed her way to a precarious perch on top of the crib before making her way equally as deftly to the ground landing on her large stuffed dog with aplomb.
"Wow! What a show." with this he held up his hand, which Rachel took great delight in giving a high five.
"i'm booking the gymnastics class tomorrow, she is gonna kick ass." House took great joy in recognising an area he truly thought that Rachel could achieve. The look of pride remained as she turned his head to look his girlfriend in the eye. Her look was not the mirror image of his as he expected. She looked aghast and appeared to have unfallen tears in her eyes.
"House she could have killed herself, didn't you see that?" She spoke quietly in a beseeching tone.
"She's fine Cuddy look at her... not even a stumble."
"She has been doing that for months now House, its so dangerous, what if she slipped?"
House blew out a long breath "OK, do you have any time free today?"
"Maybe an hour or two either side of lunch. Why?"
"We are going shopping for a big girls bed."
That evening House and Wilson spent three hours in Rachel's bedroom putting together the new bed, house having bribed the salesman in the bed store to let them have one that was in stock so that Rachel never had to climb out of her crib again.
Cuddy pulled her daughter closer knowing that her journey this morning had been significantly safer than just a few short of months ago.