Some things a kiss won't make better...John Denver doesn't live around here.

Isobel always seems to fall asleep after she has been at the sitter's all day. Too much playing I suppose. She doesn't fall asleep after school usually, just after spending the day at the baby sitter's house. I picked her up the other day and predictably she was out in a few minutes after getting home.
Isobel:(grumbling and moaning) "Not that one. No"
I walked over to ask her to repeat what she said and noticed she was still asleep.
Isobel: "It's a spoon...a lost spoon, I said."
She sat bolt upright and stared at me with a look that says 'Something is not quite right here.'
Isobel:"What?"



I am a Dad. And being a Dad means second line of defense, as in 'I'm in a bit of distress and Mummy is not around. I could just suck it up and move on...or I could go get the Old Man.' I'm O.K. with it though, I have bandaged my share of scraped knees, wiped mud caked and tear stained cheeks and kissed away owies...all when Mrs. Narrator isn't home of course.
Isobel is a tough kid for the most part and a kiss on the forehead will usually, send her into all better land and back on her merry way but a couple of weeks ago she started complaining of a sore ear. She also had a bit of a fever that always went away with medicine so when the fever dropped, so did the complaints about the ear. It's tougher to judge what's real and what's just for attention when you can't readily see it and what you can monitor, goes away with meds. I'm not kidding...after ten minutes of giving her ibuprofen you'd never even know she hadn't been feeling well. It wasn't as if it were a broken arm. we kept up with the fever reducers and left it at that.
There is one place where I always seem to be the first line of defense, for everyone in the house. Medical advice. I have no idea why. I have no specific training other than first aid (infant Heimlich maneuver comes in handy at the damnedest of times...) but if there is a medical problem they all come to me...which is why I felt even guiltier that we didn't take her to the doctor.

"My ear hurts." she said when she would wake up and come into our room and ask if she could sleep in our bed and so we gave her ibuprofen and she went back to sleep. It went on like this for a while...a couple of days...maybe more but the point is it went on and it just didn't seem to be going away. Finally she said her left ear was feeling better only to have the right one start to hurt.
But honestly, it didn't occur to us that we should take her to see anyone and I don't mean it facetiously or to make it seem that we are stupid people. Her fever had all but disappeared and when she complained, we gave her medicine and it went away. I had a ton of ear-aches as a kid and the routine was always the same. A couple of ear drops( which I found out later were vegetable oil) a cotton ball and your head on a heating pad. Within a couple of hours...a day at the most, it was gone. Mrs. Narrator experienced much the same so there was no reason to think that it would be any different with our children.
It is a terrible, heart wrenching thing to watch your child cup her hands around her ears and curl up in a fetal position because she is in that much pain... to have her come into your bedroom in the middle of the night sobbing that her ear is making her mouth hurt now...to try and do something, anything to make her feel better. Including the offer of a kiss better from Dad, only to hear her say that 'a kiss won't make it better.'
It was going into the third week and it was the same back and forth that it had been, ear pain equals ibuprofen for Isobel equals no more ear pain equals happy Isobel. But then the fever came raging back and we knew that it was getting serious and this thing was starting to grow roots.
As it is, she has had a crap go of it this winter, it's as though she has been sick every three weeks. Even on the way to Mexico she had the sniffles. I think it was only the heat of the sun around the pool that finally dried the river of snot out of her nose....only to be flooded by it again the second we landed back home...
So off to the after hours Doctor went Isobel and Mrs. Narrator and the tears that flowed at the doctors office were absolute proof of what she was going through. Izzy has always been one of those kids (much like her father) that seems to start to feel better at the mere mention of going to see the Doctor but this time there was only pain and tears...my hat is off to Mrs. Narrator, if it had been me to take Isobel to the Doctor's she likely would have come home with a pony for her troubles.
After all was said and done and the Doctor was seen, it was an ear infection and a nasty one at that and she wasn't the only one. One or two other kids in the office that day were also suffering through the same thing...From there it as off to the pharmacy to get the vile banana liquid and then back home to bed.
I think the thing I take away from this was just how quickly the vile banana liquid changed everything. Within a day she was feeling better and two days later there wasn't a single complaint about a sore ear. In my mind she was going to lose her hearing and I would have to carry the burden of my ignorance and laziness...and pockets full of hearing aid batteries and pony chow for the rest of my days...



So with Isobel's being sick the last little while, she has been allowed to sleep in our bed...though she pretty much muscles her way in there when she's feeling alright too. Come to think of it, she comes into our room virtually every night. She used to ask if she could sleep in our room. Then she would just sort of edge her way in and push one of us (me) out of bed.
Last night she came into our room around 2:47:52 a.m. When your child display an act of the magnitude that Isobel did, you tend to make not of the time it happened. I thought I was dreaming (and I am still not convinced that I wasn't) but I would swear that she had already decided that the best place for her was between Mrs. Narrator and Me and to that end, she leaped over top of me to get to that very spot. I would like to say that she cleared me cleanly with deft, cat-like grace but the sharp sudden onset pain just slightly south of my stomach, told me she did not.
I don't remember much after that and so she must have gotten comfortable and gone back to sleep fairly quickly. I don't understand the logistics of it all but I am quite certain that Isobel expands while she sleeps. It just isn't possible that a five year old girl that is 38 pounds and a little over three feet tall can take up that much room in a bed where two adults can sleep comfortably and never touch each other.
I do remember Mrs. Narrator telling me that my alarm was going off and discovering that it IS possible to sleep entirely on the seam that runs the complete circumference of a mattress...