I'll be spending the morning today in doctors' office waiting rooms with T., as we go through her annual appointments with the surgeons who repaired her metopic craniosynostosis--a birth defect she was born with. She had surgery at six months old and, ever since that July in 2004, we've been making the trek to the hospital regularly for follow-ups. The visits have trickled to annual ones now, and her last one will be next year, when she turns five.
So that will be my morning. Hours of waiting and $60 in co-pays later, we'll head out of the hospital, putting behind us the memories of that difficult summer--the surgery, the recovery, all the worry and dread and the knot-in-the-stomach feeling we carried around with us for weeks before and after that day.
And while I'm waiting in waiting rooms today, and writing co-pay checks to doctors who might examine T. for maybe all of 10 minutes, maybe you can ponder what the best thing is to do with a child in your son's class who insists on telling you, every morning when you walk in, about all the things you need to "fix" about your kid's behavior. I've tried the gentle "we all have things to work on" and the not-so-gentle "let's just worry about ourselves" and the snippy "why don't you do your morning work now?" but still the comments continue--and they are all about petty things that many of the kids in L.'s class could be guilty of--L. smacking his lips too much when he eats his snack, or L. using up all the pencils, or not sitting still. She's not being mean when she says these things, but seems to have cast herself in a helpful misguided "motherly" role. I consider myself fairly competent in dealing with my own children, but I'm always stumped when it comes to dealing with other people's children. Do I talk to the teacher about these comments? Talk frankly with the child? Let me know what you think--I need a road map for this one.