An all new obstacle course.

I haven’t had a chance to tell you about Gracie’s arm, which, as it turns out, is not falling off. But it was touch and go there for awhile.

What happened was, last Sunday night, Gracie’s scratched her wrist. I don’t know what happened and Gracie didn’t remember; she did remember at bedtime that she was injured and that it was absolutely positively crucial that she must have a band-aid on her wrist before she went to bed. The scratch was a little red and puffy, like it had just happened, and so I put some Neosporin on it and slapped a band-aid on it and sent her off to bed, ho-hum.

Somehow, because we use a regular band-aid and not the titanium, super-glue strength Tattoo band-aids, it came off during the night. As I was putting a new one on the next morning, I noticed the scratch was still red and puffy. So I put some more Neosporin on it and told Gracie to make sure her band-aid stayed on. You know, because I’m a good mom who evidently wants to kill her kid.

That night, she came home from her visit with her dad and I noticed the puffy red area around her cut had grown to the size of a quarter. I made Gracie leave the band-aid off that night because sometimes she reacts to band-aids (but not consistently), and even though the red area wasn’t where the adhesive was, maybe the band-aid was causing a reaction. On Tuesday morning and evening, I put cortisone cream on it just to be sure.

By Wednesday, I started thinking maybe her cut was infected. It wasn’t oozing pus and there weren’t any red lines marching out from the affected area, so I wasn’t overly concerned, but I did start thinking about calling the doctor’s office. When Friday rolled around without any change, I made her an appointment.

This is where things started getting tricky. See, I haven’t had to take Gracie to the doctor since she started “real” school. Before, I would just arrive at daycare, pick her up and off we’d go. With her in kindergarten, I had to drive to school, wait in line, sign her out, find her, etc. etc. etc. If she wasn’t going back to school, I had to send a note to school, call daycare and let them know she wasn’t going to be at school for pick-up, and so on and so forth. I swear there were 43 steps to this plan to get her wrist examined. All of which maybe her school should, I don’t know, maybe practice.

I showed up at school on time – a little early, even. I walked into the administration office and…no one was there. Not the clerk. Not the secretary. No one. Three or four minutes later, the assistant principal walks in. Two minutes after that, she asked me if I had been helped. I explained I needed to sign my daughter out and she waved me towards the computer and told me to sign her out. She asked whose class my daughter was in and told me there was a substitute, but couldn’t remember his name. She said to print out the slip, have it signed (by the clerk who had walked in) and then hand the slip to the teacher in the lunchroom.

Five minutes later (after a parent waiting behind me in line showed me how to sign my daughter out on the computer), I walked in to the cafeteria and found Gracie. I explained to the teacher next to her table what I was doing, but she didn’t know that Mrs. F. was out or who the substitute was. I told her the assistant principal said it was a man. “Oh…it, um, must be, um, Mr. So-and-So?” I wasn’t really confident that anyone knew what was going on at that point. But the teacher took my slip and Gracie and I left. We used the doors marked “Out” and everything.

Two minutes after that and I met the only person who did seem to know what was going on. When I say I “met” her, what I mean is that all 4’10″ of her came racing down the hallway, calling “Ma’am? Excuse me? Ma’am?” I thought she was going to tackle me. I explained to her what had just happened and she told me I was supposed to give her the dismissal slip, which she would give to the teacher, who would then fetch my child. I told her I would have done just that had either the assistant principal, the clerk, or the teacher next to Gracie’s table told me that. She was nice, but I would not recommend trying to steal a child from her because she would hunt you down and kill you.

After all of that, it took the doctor about 60 seconds to diagnose Gracie with an allergic reaction to Neosporin. Fantastic. With Gracie being 90% klutz, I’m sure that won’t be a problem at all. But at least we got her a flu shot while we were there.

Then we got to experience the joys of returning a child to school. I signed her back in, got her a return slip, brought her to her classroom…and found it empty. Her sub was there, though, and he said the kids were having gym. The very nice man even offered to walk her down there, but I actually knew where that was. I’m glad I declined, because I would have missed out on the puzzled look of the gym teacher when I brought Gracie in. Maybe it was because it was 12:30 in the afternoon, maybe it was because I was a parent and not a teacher, or maybe it was because it was pretty chaotic in the gym, but there was a little confusion. Gracie skipped to the end of her classline, though, so I was all good.

I have to say – the entire experience made me look at paying daycare millions of dollars not to care in a whole new light.

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Tags: children, health, school