Well here are two stories that show that I might not be the
best father in the world.
Take 1:
Saturday Matthew woke up with red spots all over his face
and body. I was the first to notice
it. I told my wife to look at it and she
took his temperature. We suspected mumps
or chicken pox. He had no fever. I told my wife he needs to go see a doctor
nonetheless. Matthew started whining.
“I don’t want to go to the doctor,” he cried.
“You need to,” I said.
“He doesn’t have fever,” my wife put up the opposing
rationale.
“Mommy, I don’t want to go to the doctor,” Matthew appealed.
“We don’t know what this is.
It doesn’t look right.” I replied
to my wife.
“You’re not going to get a shot,” my wife reassured him.
“Mommy I don’t want any shots.”
This back and forth between them went on for a few times. Finally in my full ogre father persona I
said, “Hush up. If the doctor says you
need a shot, you’re going to get one.”
“No, no, no!” he screamed.
“I don’t want a shot.
I got on the phone and called the doctor’s office and got us
in for 12:30.
My wife tried to tell him he wasn’t going to get a
shot. His whining was just too
much. I took my pointing index finger
and simulating a needle poked him in the leg and said “shot.” That’s when he really cried and my wife said
something nasty to me.
“Come on,” she said to him.
We’ll call grandma and have her come with us.” After a little more reassuring Matthew finally
said, “Oh alright.” But then he pointed
his finger at me and loudly said, “But Daddy doesn’t come. No daddy.”
LOL!!!
[To conclude this story the doctor said it was probably
related to the fever he had last week (I blogged it here) and it was nothing to
worry about. Still I have to say that
the diagnosis wasn’t satisfying. What
exactly was this? My wife posted it on
FaceBook and her cousin replied that her daughter gets that all the time after
taking antibiotics. It goes away in 3-5
days. Now that made sense, but now I
worry about whether I have a good pediatrician.
She’s very experienced and highly recommended, but why didn’t she tell
us this?]
Take 2:
I wanted to take Matthew to the zoo for Father’s Day, but
unfortunately the weather was expected to rain and with Matthew with all his
spots on his body we figured let’s stay home and do something. My wife suggested we “go camping” in his
room. It was a pretend camping. She set up a structure with sheets over it to
crawl into as a tent. We used a battery
powered lantern to pretend it was the campfire, and we had these two (not
exactly sure how to describe them) light sabers that lit up as sticks to
pretend we were roasting marshmallows. We
ate a few “marshmallows” and then I said let’s go into the tent and tell scary
stories.
Ok, we crawled under and I thought about a story about a man
who buys a house and he hears a cat screech every night. I think I must have merged a couple of
different Edgar Allan Poe stories to come up with this on the spot. Well, the man investigates every corner of
the house and can’t find the cat. He
goes through all the closets and the basement and nothing. He goes to sleep and he hears it again. He goes through the house (and I take Matthew
through the closets and basement again) and still finds nothing. Finally he just goes to sleep but every night
the same thing. The cat screeches and
the man concludes it’s a ghost cat. Matthew
then volunteered, “Maybe the cat was outside?”
Smart boy with good visual skills I thought. Well, the man looked out the window and still
no cat.
This goes on for a long time and finally the man gets scared
and leaves the house to live in a hotel.
After a while he’s running out of money and needs to go back home. So he comes home but the cat screeched is
gone. No more. (Mind you, I’m making this up on the
fly.) After a long time he decides to
get married, and the wife comes to live
with him. That first night the cat
screech is back. “Wheeeow.” What’s that she asks? Oh no, the cat is back. And so the wife goes investigating the house,
all the rooms, the closets, and the basement.
Nothing. And the cat keeps
screeching.
This goes on for a few nights. Finally the wife says I hear it inside the
wall. The cat is inside the wall! We have to cut a hole in the wall. So they get a saw and they cut a big hole in
the wall. The man is scared but the wife
is not. He tells her to look in the
hole. She sticks her head and looks back
and forth, back and forth and sees nothing.
So the man looks in the hole, and that’s when I took my hands and formed
a cat’s claw and clutched Matthew in the face, screeching “Wheaooow.”
And that’s when Matthew jumped out of his skin and
screamed! LOL!! He screamed and started to cry. I had to take him out of the “tent” and hold
him to let him know it wasn’t real.
So no kudos for Father’s Day. I’m not sure I was that good a father this
weekend.
