Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Just Sick Enough

Alyssa had a cold last week.

It was bad enough that she stayed home from school last Monday. She never stays home so this was a serious cold.

She did return to school on Tuesday but has been coughing and blowing through tissues by the box ever since. She requests cough medicine daily and needs a decongestant nightly.

Even with all this going on, Tom and I let her have a friend over on Friday night so that friend could go to the mall with us on Saturday. That was fine since I could control when they went to sleep. Okay, so I couldn’t actually make them SLEEP but I could make them turn off the light in A’s room and remind them, repeatedly that we were getting up early the next day and they needed to sleep.

Lyss’s friend mentioned the next morning that they went to sleep early the night before.

Lyss replied dryly, “For you.”

That day Alyssa seemed to feel pretty well, though she still sounded congested and coughed a few times.

Throughout the day, the girls received texts from a third friend. This friend wanted A and S to come to her house that evening. I told them that if S’s parents were okay with it, I’d drop them at T’s house and pick them up at 10 that evening. S declared that T wanted them to spend the night and her (S’s) mom was okay with that.

I told Lyssie that I didn’t want her to spend the night because, hello, still sort of sick. She told me she was cool with just going over for the evening.

All went as planned until 9:45, when Lyss texted me. “Hi, I haven’t coughed all evening. Can I stay later or spend the night?”

Ha. Nice try.

I replied, “I’m glad you’re feeling better. I’ll be there at 11.”

Again, she was pretty cool when I picked her up. I explained to her that I know what happens when she stays at either S’s or T’s house. They don’t go to sleep until at least 3am and even though she’s on the mend, she still needs more sleep than she’d get at her friend’s house.

She agreed with me that she would sleep more at home and twenty minutes after we got home, she proved me right about her needing more sleep because she was in bed and fast asleep.

I’m so lucky that she listens to me and doesn’t get mad when I put my parenting skills to work. But even if she did get mad at me, she still would have been home and maybe even in trouble. As it was, she had a little fun, got decent rest and finished a social studies project Sunday afternoon without needing a nap.

Yep, I’m putting this one down in the parenting ‘win’ category.

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