Kindergarten Lessons

Daniel is learning an amazing amount of stuff in kindergarten this year. His reading skills are particularly growing at an exponential rate. He is not the only one learning stuff though. Suzy and I are getting many lessons as well. Recently we had to take the boys in for their yearly checkups and needed to figure out how to do that. When do you go? No appointments on Saturday. Daniel has school until 3:15 five days a week. Not wanting to take him out of school (hey, we are paying lots of money for him to go there!) we decided on the late afternoon time slot. This is a big departure for us, typically we try to get the first appointment of the day, to ensure that the doctor hasn't fallen too far behind. Now we were on the other end of the spectrum.

So Suzy gets the boys from school, then they all swing by and pick me up from work (we like to double team them at doctors/dentist appointments) and off we head to downtown La Jolla. We arrive a bit after 4 for our 4:15 appointment (Suzy and I are both like to be early for things) and settle in for the wait. And settle in some more. And settle some more. And settle... you get the picture. Thankfully we had the video Ipod playing Scooby Doo for the boys because boy did we wait. I think that we finally got called out of the waiting room just before 5. Yikes.

Unfortunately that wasn't the end of the waiting. Back to the exam room we settle in. And settle in. This time we mixed it up and played a raucous game of 'I Spy' with the boys. Sammy won, but only because he kept changing colors.

'I Spy something... red!'
'Blue!' - wait wasn't it just red?
'Red'! - rascal!

The exam room wait was also broken up by Daniel's eye and ear exam (both fine, thank goodness) and Sammy's eye exam (he did fine except instead of letters they showed him symbols and he had no idea what the '+' symbol was, also, Daniel was dying to help him, I almost had to physically restrain him from giving hints).

Finally the doctor comes in, and except for the fact that he is a Patriots fan he was great. Easy going, good with the boys, good with us. Both boys are doing great health wise. What a relief, you know that they are fine but getting the expert opinion is always a plus.

So, you parents of small children know what's next. The doctor checks his shot record notes and decides the boys should get a flu shot and Daniel got one more. The boys were prepped. They both were almost looking forward to the shots, and we haven't had problems with them about shots for years. Until the nurse came in and said, 'Okay, I am going to prick your finger to check your iron.' Daniel got this look on his face like, 'No way in heck I am going to let you do that.' He had no idea what she meant by prick, but he was convinced it meant take a big sword and chop that finger right off. The panic set in, and we weren't prepared. You are okay for the shot, but the finger prick is setting you off? The scream that resulted from the finger prick led directly to a massive squirm fest trying to avoid the shots, which made the shots much more painful 'cause he was moving all around. Of course Sammy is sitting in my lap watching all of this. When Daniel finally finished his near death experience and stumbled wearily across the room to a chair Sammy looked at the nurse and said, 'You're not doing that to me!'. So I had to carry Sammy to the torture expert (nurse, who was actually quite good), and restrain his arm so he wouldn't move it around. She pricked, she poked and it was over before he got too far down the path of hysteria. Of course both boys wore the badges of their battle (band-aids) with honor for the next twelve hours. Sammy didn't want to take a bath that night because the water would touch the gaping open wound in his finger from the prick. Of course when the band-aids finally came off there were no marks.

So, what lessons did we as parent learn? Last appointments of the day stink. Don't let one kid watch the other get shots. Don't forget the finger prick when you are prepping the kids for what will happen at the doctor's office. Video Ipods are worth their wait in gold. McDonalds for dinner after traumatic experiences works pretty well. They really are Happy Meals.