A Fine Line

Alyssa stayed home from school on Friday with a sore throat and a fever. We started antibiotics on Saturday for strep throat and yesterday she seemed to be on the mend.

Ahhh, except last night, after being outside in the spring weather for hours, chasing Orville and ‘helping’ Tom take down the snow fence, Alyssa remembered that, damn, she was going to have to go to school today since she was feeling so much better.

So she started paving the way for a relapse around 7pm. She leaned into me and said softly, “My throat still sort of hurts.”

I was compassionate, I hugged her and said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I’m also sorry that you ran around so much today, it probably made you thirsty and wore you out.”

She sighed and didn’t say anything more about it for a while. Then she got up and took her temperature. She put the thermometer down and muttered, “I hate that thermometer.”

I laughed and asked, “Why? Because it doesn’t show that you have a fever?”

She knew I was on to her but that didn’t stop the next phase of “Convince Mom I’m still sick.”

She settled in again only to sigh and say, “I get so thirsty from this sore throat.”

I asked her if she was allowed to get up anytime she needed to and get a drink from the water fountain in the room.

She frowned and admitted that yes, they can get a drink whenever they need one.

We went to bed and she laid there for a bit, sitting up every few minutes to get one of those desperately needed drinks of water.

This morning, she woke up in a state.

Oh dear heavens, the melodrama that ensued. She cried, she whined, she worried over being thirsty and she insisted that she had to sneeze but couldn’t! She cried that she was so tired she could just sleep all day. Poor little rabbit.

You know, it’s a fine line for me, that line between being compassionate and being a sap. There’s also a fine line between being strict and strong and being mean.

We sent her to school. The doctor told me on Saturday that after two days of antibiotics, she would no longer be contagious.

I gave her a washcloth to wash her face, hugged her tight and told her that if she got to school and found that she just couldn’t take it, to go to the office and they’d call us to come get her.

See, Alyssa is one of those kids who doesn’t like to make waves at school. I thought for sure that once she got to school, she’d be happy to see her friends and willing to tough it out.

I was wrong.

She was at school for all of forty minutes when they called me from the office, saying she was in the clinic saying her throat hurt and she wanted to come home.

Sigh.

I guess I came down on the wrong side of the line this time. But…I’m not being too hard on myself. She really did play hard yesterday but it was during Tom’s watch, not mine. And we both know that if she’d played that hard on my watch, he’d never let me hear the end of it. Since it happened during his watch, I’m not one to rub it in (much.)

So she got to spend the day at Gram’s. She swore she’d sleep all day long. We’ll see.