Mediating for These Little People

These little people who live with me, I mean. Here is one of them now. Hank has had a loose-sounding cough for a few days--actually I have it too--then yesterday he woke up with a fever. More worrisome, he was breathing shallowly, and every thirty seconds or so he would take a deep, sighing breath. That got my attention. After we got his fever down, he didn't seem too unhappy, but I took him to the doctor. You know how doctors and nurses will address the child, but they're really talking to you? They were taken aback that Hank spoke up and told them all about his symptoms. When the doc asked, "Hank, what's going on with you?" he said, "I can't breath and my chest hurts and my head hurts." That got the ped's attention too. She said his lungs sounded clear, but neither I nor Hank was really satisfied with that, apparently, because Hank said, "There's this thing in my lungs. I can hear it and I hear it ALL DAY." Which was sort of cryptic, but the doc ordered a chest xray. I was like, way to advocate for yourself, my buddy.

Here he is after changing into his little gown. He was put out that there was no mirror, so I took his picture to show him. Anyway, the xray showed no pneumonia, so the doc just thinks he has congestion in his upper chest, and she gave us an inhaler to use if we need to.

But for the point of this post: As we navigated this experience, I was thinking about how maybe our second-biggest job as parents--after physically caring for these kids--is mediating their experiences for them, modeling how they're supposed to respond to and feel about what's going on around them. There were several novel and potentially scary things happening: Hank had a breathing treatment at the doctor's office, which involved wearing a mask on his face and was REALLY noisy; and then there was all the weird stuff in the xray room, and having to lie down up on the big table with his back on the xray plate thingie, while I held his hands up above his head and the big camera moved around. Dude was completely chilled out about it, and even interested in all the xray stuff.

I thought, you know, he wouldn't be beyond his rights to be like, "To hecks with this, I'm going to freak out now." But he didn't. I kept up a stream of "wow-isn't-this-interesting-yet-not-a-big-deal" chit chat, and he was fine. I mean, we all do this all the time. I'm good, but if parental judo were an Olympic sport, I don't think I would medal in it. I would be in, like, the junior city semifinals, maybe. But this job of mediating the child's environment, this is huge, you know? I was thinking, what a disaster for a child if he has nobody to do this. I don't mean that only scary experiences need mediating, I think the parent teaches the child how to react to nearly every stimulus, starting in infancy. How intolerably difficult the world would be if a child were on his own in that regard. And what does that do to the mind of that kid and the person he becomes? It is sort of a big responsibility, this parenting business.

So that happened yesterday, and somehow I also managed to go up to Laura's school two separate times to do reading groups and February birthday celebrations. They also had Valentine exchange, AND it was Pajama Day AND they had doughnuts in the morning. ZOMG the sugar. Hank is still ailing today, but not so much that he hasn't been out playing in the snow. BTW, snow! We have like three inches out there! I know everyone up and down the boulevard has already had their Snowpocalypse, but this one is ours.

I am crossing fingers and toes that Laura and Matt's mom are able to fly out of here on their trip to Providence tomorrow.

I hope y'all are well. More updates as conditions warrant.