Sorry Kids! Your Mom's a Nurse

My son went to the skate park yesterday. The place was hopping with skateboarders of all ages perfecting tricks. But the first thought that entered my son's head was: "Mommy would not be happy. Look at all the kids riding around without a helmet!" 

Yes! My crazy insistence on injury prevention has seeped in. My boys know that I will call out to any random kid on wheels, "Where's your helmet?!" Because I am a nurse in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. I have seen firsthand the protection that a little plastic bowl can provide your noggin... and the horrifying effects that a hard hit on concrete can leave on an unprotected skull. I wish I could pass out business cards with photos of kids who have suffered head injuries. Too much? Yeah, you're probably right, but it's annoying to see kids needing hospitalization for injuries that might have been prevented if they had actually clipped their helmets in place.

And yet... being the child of a nurse presents an interesting dichotomy. My kids know that while you can never be too careful, you're never quite sick enough to need an ER visit. Is your arm still attached to your body? Then you'll be fine. It's barely hanging on by the ligament and you're bleeding profusely? Well, maybe we should call the advice nurse... right after you use your good arm to clean up that blood!

My older son had a broken clavicle last year. I'm embarrassed to say that we didn't even get x-rays until 5 days later. Hey, don't judge! He came home after flipping over his bike handlebars and complained that his shoulder hurt. In retrospect, I should've known that a broken collarbone is the most likely injury from this kind of Superman stunt, but I was more concerned with whether or not he had been wearing his helmet. And, in my defense I wanted to take him in at least a day earlier but he insisted he was too busy with school projects to find time for a measly doctor's visit. Surprisingly, he toughed it out without much complaint, but loves to tell people how his parents neglected him for the good part of a week.

Heaven forbid either boy has the sniffles though! He will whine all day about his congestion and how his sore throat feels like it's on fire, and how he hates the gross-tasting medicine. On and on. Yeah, we've all had colds. Buck up Buttercup! You'll manage.

My younger son came down with a mysterious illness right as winter break ended. I think it might have been a nasty strain of "I enjoyed my time off and don't want to go back to school just yet". I wasn't falling for it and insisted he'd be just fine. I'm not really impressed unless you have a raging fever and some color change. I sent him off to school with the assurance that he could come home if he truly felt miserable at school since both mom and dad were home and available at a moment's notice. After running errands and doing housework I noticed that there was a message on the machine. A sad little voice pleaded, "I'm not really feeling good. Can you come pick me up?" The time indicated that he'd called three hours before! (My husband didn't hear the phone when I was out.) I rushed to call the office, picturing my baby lying on the hard cot all alone and miserable. She assured me he hadn't been in and patched me through to the classroom. My son's teacher didn't know he had tried to call earlier so nobody looked up my cell number to reach me. When asked how he was feeling and if he needed to be picked up early (with only an hour of school remaining) he said he felt fine. Like 7/10 good. This is why I never worry right away.

Well that's not really true. When you work with extremely sick kids you see a lot of scary diseases that can spring up unexpectedly. Nurses know too much and sometimes we freak out unnecessarily. I'm guessing most people's kids don't wake up to a parent leaning over them with a stethoscope or shining a light in their eyes, or bending their chin down to their chest to check for meningitis. Is it a headache or an invasive brain tumor? A twisted knee or osteosarcoma? Oh my  God - leprosy??? Oh, wait, that's just a hangnail. Yeah, okay, time to dial it back a notch.

We all have our weird parental neuroses. My boys' immune systems will be stronger for having battled mild diseases without the help of antibiotics. They'll know how to tough it out when they sometimes feel like crap. That doesn't mean there won't be whining, but they'll be fine in the end. We got this.

Pass this on to anyone who was lucky to survive having a nurse for a parent!

Homework Hell-p

I have a confession to make:  I enjoy solving algebraic equations.  And multiplying and dividing fractions.  (Glad to get that off my chest).  It's all like a puzzle to me and I love doing that kind of brain stimulating homework.  The thing is, it's not my homework.  My almost 12-year-old son is a huge procrastinator.  A big, stinkin', distracted, overstimulated mess of a boy.  He cannot just sit down and power through his assignments in a reasonable amount of time to then enjoy the rest of the evening with his family.  What should take maybe two hours takes him six or seven hours when you count dinner time, a few chores, and hundreds of visits to the bathroom.  No, he doesn't have any sort of disorder that makes focus near impossible (nor does he have a bladder the size of a pistachio) - he is just an adolescent boy with other things to occupy his mind and cause him to forget what he's doing.

When he started middle school we assumed he had the homework thing all figured out.  He didn't ask for any help and we didn't check assignments, but he's responsible and strives to do well, so the threat of failure was his own motivator.  But what is "failure"?  He started to worry after a string of math assignments came back with 3/5 points.  This meant that his grade was a measly 60% (for you math-challenged folks) which translates to a solid D-.  We all started worrying a bit.  And so began the homework checks before he went to bed and his revisions early in the morning before sprinting out the door.  I didn't really care for that method because it didn't allow for immediate recognition of what was wrong, so he and I started doing math together.

Of course, he had to remind me how to do each new process.  Dividing fractions?  You have to flip the numerator and denominator and then cross-simplify before multiplying.  Duh!  Right, I knew that... But he enjoyed being the tutor, which really translates to pointing out what an idiot I was for not knowing this stuff already.  Flashback to my own adolescence: I remember handing over my math book and worksheets to my dad so he could help me.  When he wanted to read the chapter first, I thought he was a total imbecile.  What?  You went to Berkeley!  You should know how to do high school math!  Jeez.  Yeah, what goes around, blah blah blah.

Most of the teachers make concessions for homework that seems to take too long.  If kids are spending too much time on it but seem to have mastered the concept, or the child needs more specific instruction, parents can sign off on the homework.  I don't think Zack's teachers really want a note detailing how long he lounged on each couch, what music he finally decided on, and his chosen method to stealthily shoot Nerf darts across the hall into his brother's room.  He's like the dog in "Up" - everything is distrac --- SQUIRREL! --- ting.  And it doesn't matter how many times I urge him to focus and keep working.  I'm even getting tired of hearing my speech, especially when he has his head on the table at 10 pm because he's so tired.

If only Minecraft made you complete an algebra problem before you could close the doors against zombies, things might be different.