Today could very well prove to be my ultimate (to date, I’m sure there’s more to come) parenting FAIL.
I drop Kate off at my grandma’s on my way to work in the morning, and then my grandma takes her to school. As I left this morning, Kate told me she wasn’t feeling well and that her throat hurt and her back hurt (enter my suspicion – throat and back ailments aren’t a typical combination). She seemed ok, so I headed on, but about halfway through my commute she called again to tell me she wasn’t feeling good (despite her nutritious breakfast of cinnamon rolls and ice cream, which of course was the only thing that could possibly make her throat feel better). We agreed that Grandma would take her temperature, and if she didn’t have a fever, she’d go to school.
Great.
Except she called me again about 15 minutes later, still insisting that she didn’t feel well and she couldn’t go to school. I could, of course, be totally wrong about this, but I really do not think she is sick. Moms can tell these things, right? Yeah, famous last words. So in any case, we decided she would go to school and I said if she still felt bad there, she could have the secretary call me. I am banking on the fact that once she gets there, she will be fine.
However.
After I got off the phone with her, I checked my calendar and wouldn’t you know it, today is the day Kate will get the H1N1 vaccine at school. This day totally crept up on me. I was planning to prepare her for it, but I totally didn’t, and I was afraid that if I called her and told her after all we had gone through debating her attendance today anyway, that it would be a giant disaster.
So now she’s headed to school as we speak (or I type), blissfully unaware of the fact that she’s going to be vaccinated today. Unless, of course, she does know about the vaccination because of school announcements (the same way she found out about the skating party last week that I was conveniently not going to mention), and that’s where this entire problem is coming from.
Or maybe she is sick, and I didn’t believe her. And if she is sick, she shouldn’t be getting the vaccination. And that, my friends, would be a parenting fail of epic proportions.
Oh, the parenting guilt! It’s so hard to know when to put on the brakes to call it a sick day. Some days my kids are sick and I send them off to school thinking it’s not so bad and then regret it later. Other days I take the plunge and keep them home only to have the pediatrician look at me like I am crazy because they are bouncing off the walls at his office not acting sick in the least. “I swear they were dying this morning…”
It’s such a balancing act that it is really hard to know for sure. Don’t be too hard on yourself! Some days I go to pick them up thinking they have been just miserable all day and when I get there, they are totally fine.
Hmmmm…parenting failure…no. You only have intuition, not a medical degree…let the guilt go!
UP
It does creap up on us fast. I am blessed to have all the kids vacc’ed for the flu and the H1N1. The baby 6 mo’s got hers today and I felt so bad adding 2 extra shots but in the long run its so much better then getting sick.
YOU ARE FINE!!! Dad wouldn’t let me even THINK about skipping school unless I was throwing up all over the place or had a fever of 104…so I turned out some what okay right?! 🙂