Home/sick

Rowan is home sick today. Just before midnight last night, our bedroom door opened and he appeared, backlit by the light in the hallway, and then … well, you don't need to know the details except for thank God hardwood floors and not carpet. I love kid logic: I think I need to barf. I'll go see my moms. Today, he's home, bopping about the house in his pajamas and seemingly perfectly fine, if slightly low-energy. He's kept down food, he has good colour, he's practicing his tae kwon do patterns and creating bigger and better Pokémon decks and revelling in the pile of books we picked up from the library and the extra iPod time. He's totally happy — a quiet day at home, both parents to himself with , dare I say it, no sibling to dilute the attention.

It's so rare to have just one child around the house with both of us. And despite the extra laundry and the nagging worry that we haven't seen the last of this gastro bug (why, why, why did I decide it was a good idea to finish off his uneaten oatmeal yesterday?), I do like it. One minimally ill kid is so cozy, so happy, so easy. He wanders into my office and hugs me, offers me trivia tidbits. We lie down on opposite ends of the couch with our reading material and his bare foot nudges my thigh. I sent a couple of e-mails, write a couple of paragraphs, fold a couple of sheets, ruffle his hair, and revel in this sweet, quiet, stolen day.

Dexter

I got a call from the school the other day.

(That’s a whole genre right there, isn’t it? Documents that begin, “I got a call from the school the other day”? That’s about as writing prompt-y as you can get, full of rich imaginings involving truancy and vomit and broken limbs and suspensions and lice. I mean, no one’s heart grows just a little bit lighter when they see the name of their child’s school on call display before picking up.)

Anyway, so I picked up (like I’m going to ignore a call from the school), and there was Rowan sounding very small and far away. “Mom?” He sounded as though he was at the bottom of a well. “Mom? My neck is bleeding.”

Awesome.

Turns out that a stick was thrown by an unknown child and caught him in the neck, giving him a nasty gash. His teacher came on the phone to say that while it looked ugly, it didn’t seem to be too serious. But that he didn’t want a Band-Aid on it. “Mm-hmm,” I said.

“So,” she said, “do you want to come get him, or do you want him to stay in school until the end of the day?”

Um, guess?

“Well,” I said, hedging my bets and weighing my deadline. “If he can manage to stay in school until the end of the day, that’s fine with me.” But I knew it wouldn’t fly even as I said the words: once the option of going home was introduced, the option of staying there fell to the bottom of that same well. I overheard the discussion in the background and then the teacher came on the phone again. “Okay,” I said, “I’m on my way.”

And I went, meeting him in the office where he sat, big-eyed and forlorn, on a bench, holding a piece of paper towel to his neck. When he saw me, his lower lip began to tremble. I got a look at the cut: jagged, slightly deep, about an inch long. Nothing pretty, but nothing too serious. Apparently, his teacher told me, he’d gone right back to class and hadn’t even noticed it until she pointed out.

He agreed after much convincing to put a Band-Aid over it for the walk home.

“You’re going to want to put some Polysporin on that,” a bigger kid, probably in fifth grade, said to me as I went to sign out Rowan.

“Great idea,” I said. Because I would never think to put Polysporin on my kid’s cut.

But he was just warming up. “It’s a really good thing that didn’t get him even 1 INCH over,” the fifth-grader continued.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been good if it had hit his face.”

“His face?” the kid said. “I’m talking about his CAROTID ARTERY. If he had cut open his CAROTID ARTERY, he would have been dead in like six seconds flat. Blood everywhere!”

Rowan stood next to me, his eyes growing bigger and bigger. I pulled him closer to me.

“Yup, that CAROTID ARTERY is a killer,” the kid continued. What, are you 70? I wanted to ask. Instead I smiled and thanked him and gathered up my lucky-to-be-alive son. Who skipped the whole way home, and then, when Rachel came home with a movie for him, ran to the door to meet her him practically shrieked with glee, “Guess what! If a stick had hit my CAROTID ARTERY, I would’ve DIED!”

Could be worse... could be lice ...

Has it been a week? It’s been a week. I would have written something by now, except that every post I could think of writing began with the line, “I’m the only person in the house who has not yet come down with the barfing sickness.” And that just seemed like tossing fate a big, shiny red apple and saying, “Take a bite, baby.” Three... two... one...

Okay, still not barfing. We’ll see how long that lasts.

I invited me and the boys over to a friend’s house last Saturday evening for dinner and trampolining. At about 10 p.m., I got the phone call every parent dreads: “Anyone at your house barfing yet?” No, not yet, but on Monday morning I stumbled out of bed and was greeted by Rowan, who said, by way of good morning, “Isaac was throwing up in his bed all night.” Rowan, however, seemed as healthy as an apricot, so we sent him off to school. By midmorning, however, I had arrived at the school to collect him — a miserable, slick little package of a child — from the school’s office. “He’s been very brave,” the principal called as we left. By the next day, both kids were fine, just in time for Rachel to succumb.

Next in line? The babysitter.

My current goal is not to come down with the summer cold that both boys seem to have picked up. And to catch up on the various deadlines that went whooshing by à la Douglas Adams as I pulled extra shifts on barf-watch duty and childcare last week.

Fortunately, Dana Rudolph over at Mombian is picking up the slack, with the second of three giveaways for And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents and Our Unexpected Families. Visit her and leave a comment (by midnight today) about how you have created (or plan/hope to create) your family, or the language your family uses to describe itself, and you could win a copy. The lovely folks at Insomniac Press will mail you a copy directly, so you don’t have to worry about us infecting you.

Good luck!