As I listened my mind flashed to my work area at home.  I thought of how unscheduled my time is and how rarely the house is truly clean and pleasant lately.  I’ve been hiding behind the excuse of adding a third kid but honestly I’ve been on a steady decline in organization and cleanliness for the past few years.  Essentially I was being told that the one thing keeping Laylee from being fully successful at school was the same one thing keeping me from being fully successful at life.  Was it catching?

It’s also much more chaotic to have three children sitting in the microscopic doctor’s office than it was with one.  I’m also lazier and tired of being embarrassed when I bring my deathly ill child into the office only to have her go crazy-insane with energy and high spirits once we come in contact with the doctor’s aura, thus outing me as the proxy-hypochondriac liar I am.

There has to be some better way to gauge how sick a kid is and to figure out what to do.  I’ve been thinking of inventing a new kind of thermometer, a TherMomEter, that tells you the things you really want to know.  Here are a few of things it might say on the display:

Her face is covered in little bruises from where she has bobbled, careened and slammed into baskets, plastic slides and flooring.  She walks like an inexperienced sailor on a small vessel being tossed in a violent tropical storm surge.  Maybe if we put her on a boat she could walk in a straight line. 

She scares me.

Junior High parents didn’t hear about it until weeks after his arrest when a story aired on the evening news.  No word was sent home from the school, although it appears that he was searched and arrested on school property.

The news broke and then the parental emails started flying.  Why had the school kept silent?