The Day Wasted
/Today was a day that I just could not seem to enjoy. I realize I don't feel this tension very often. After all, Baby Girl has some kind of Doppler voodoo power and whenever that face spreads into a big play-dough smile, suddenly the most ominous gray sky is casting rainbows and sunbeams all around me. It is so hard to stay in a funk when she is always shooting cupid arrows everywhere and reminding me that the object of the game totally is to ring around that rosey and eventually we all fall down, see? All of us. We all fall down. But today, although a gorgeous sunny one with a yummy-smelling breeze, I felt like the only one down. Now, one of the hot water tanks in our building did crap out last night, precluding any of us from showering. And I do so love to bathe, even with Baby Girl as an audience who likes to bath bomb me with the leftover ch-ch-chillay water from one of her bath buckets.
That wasn't what was bringing me down, though. I was thinking about Baby Girl's appointment at Children's Hospital this afternoon. She was assessed with "failure to thrive" at her last doctor's appointment, which anyone who looks at her can see that's complete bulllllogna, she's completely proportional and developmentally way ahead of the curve. But she'd dropped percentiles in the last few visits for her weight, so the doc referred us to Children's so we could rule out a giant malaria-infected tapeworm or another pestilence that could be causing her weight gain to become so sluggish. So of course I was dreading it in a pouty sort of way. It just seemed like such a waste of time.
However, as we strollered our way to the waiting room of the nutrition clinic, I realized what a blessing the visit was going to be. Children's hospitals, I had forgotten in some impossible way, are where children who are truly sick are treated. I saw so many children being wheeled through the halls, several of them who probably required constant care, and especially to feed themselves. I thought how much strength their parents must require to get through a day, how little help they may receive sometimes, and here I was complaining that I had to go to an appointment *for my child* that would be a waste of *my* time.
Nothing conclusive came out of Baby Girl's appointment other than that she is clearly perfect and has a special penchant for taking off her shirt to assure every clinician that she has a belly, yes, this is her belly, right here, do you see it? Belly. I also know one other thing, and that is that my child was able to ride home with me from the hospital and feed herself dinner. Maybe it was a hot dog, and maybe it wasn't the whole thing as the doctors would have liked, but right now she is sleeping in her own bed. I hope she is dreaming pleasant dreams about all the children she saw today, about their being made well, if not in this life then surely in the next, where there will be no more sickness and no more malnutrition, and maybe the slides will be made of rainbows and sunshine and play-dough. I can only hope.
***
Sometimes some of it makes it into her mouth.
You'd be blowing through the calories if you were this busy, too.
This is why we're drinking Mystery Tea lately.
