Reflections on a Sick Day

Sarah stayed out of summer camp today with a cough and a marginal temperature. (Anywhere from one to three degrees above normal depending on when the reading was taken.) I stayed home with her. I think it could just be allergies or a cold -- the temps were never clearly out of an ear thermometer's margin of error -- but if I'm wrong, we want to be safe. Her appetite, usually voracious, was also off.

One reflection: this makes me really admire single parents and wonder how they do it. If Sarah had been sick Monday and I were her only parent, I'd have missed a critical deadline. Tuesday, I'd have had to scramble to cancel an appointment made long before. Today, Tam would have had real problems with her deadline. But today was a light one for me, and the calendar could be cleared. Thank God we're both here. The odds are one or the other of us can take off without major setbacks to our work.

Sarah said to me in the car today (we went to Target for medicine and, yes, a couple of DVDs to pass the time) that she'd been thinking about the fact that when she was a baby she didn't know who Mom and I were when we first held her, and so she cried at first. (We've often discussed the first meeting video (not currently online) and first meeting photos and she understands that she had probably never seen any non-Chinese people before we held her in our arms. That, of course, was six years ago. I thought it a rather mature reflection for a seven-year-old.

Within half an hour of returning home, fully playing on the "sick day" theme, it was "Dad, change the channel." "Dad, the video's over." "Dad, I'm thirsty!" Once she called me in from the other room to tell me we could get a free trial at Blockbuster. Once I was urgently called to remove a plate of crackers she decided not to eat. It was taking up space.

Now she clearly knows who we are . . .

Her domestic staff.

(And loving every minute of it, of course. It's what parenting is all about.)