Derek's Day Off...(Bueller? Bueller?*)

We've been very, very lucky in the "healthy kids" department over the years (Hold on, I have to pause here to knock on...all the wood in the immediate vicinity, lest I jinx us. Okay, I'm back). Honestly, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been summoned to school to pick up a sick boy. (Calls at recess time? Those are entirely more frequent...Derek got whacked in the face with a basketball...Riley bumped his head on the monkey bars..."Um, thanks for letting me know...send the goofball back to class with an icepack, he'll be fine!" Or is that not quite the Sympathetic Mom Response the School Nurse expects?)

This past Friday, however, I did get that dreaded voicemail from the Health Room. Evidently Derek had lasted long enough after arriving at school to complete his Spelling Test (that's my young scholar), then headed to the Office to lie down, complaining of a killer headache. I immediately left work and slipped into full Florence Nightingale mode--picking up Motrin from home, and a bagel and Gatorade from the grocery store--before delivering the Mom First Aid Supplies to my little soldier at the battlefield...uh, I mean elementary school. We administered the food and medicine, then waited to see what, if any, positive effect they might have. And...nothing. So I obtained his Official Discharge (i.e: told the Attendance Secretary he was outta there) and brought him home.

I had already quizzed him to determine if he was experiencing any other symptoms (ears? fine. throat? okay. stomach? pain-free. fever? none), so the Parental Differential Diagnosis was: your standard, terribly painful but not dangerous, Sinus Headache. Now, Derek will be 11 next week, so I informed him that he would be on his own for a couple of hours while I returned to work and finished my last assignment of the day. I set him up in the darkened Family Room with his Sports Drink, a warm fleecy blanket covering him from head-to-toe, the TV tuned to the Fox Soccer Channel, the remote by his side, and my cellphone number. I hung out with him for a while, imparting some therapeutic Mom TLC, then advised him to stay still and rest until I got back.

But before I left, we had to have The Talk--no, not THAT talk, the one where we review The Home-Alone Rules. As I mentioned, this had never happened before, so I wasn't exactly sure which points I needed to list and clarify. Derek is definitely the kind of kid you can trust: reliable, sensible, responsible. He already knows basic directives like: Don't Answer the Door, and Stay Inside. So, since he's such a rule-follower anyway, I hit upon what I deemed most important for him that day: "Honey, if you get your appetite back, you can eat whenever you feel like it!" (because otherwise I could just see him waiting until he was able to ask permission...as the general, everyday policy is "no eating between meals".) Obviously his sense of humor was not impaired by his pounding head; his instant reply was a heartfelt, "Whew! I've been waiting for those words since I was born!" By the time I left him, he'd already asked for another bagel, and when I walked back in the door 2 hours later, he was polishing off the remainder of a bag of pretzels and requesting the sandwich he hadn't gotten around to eating from his lunchbag...I could only conclude that either he wasn't that ill after all, or a few quality hours on the couch speeded his recovery immensely!

In fact, the only tense moment of the afternoon occurred when I had wrapped up my Health and Safety Lecture and was just about to depart...and Derek cheerfully quipped, "Don't worry, Mom, I won't burn down the house!" Wait, what? I didn't include Fire Prevention in my presentation! Maybe I should stay with you, after all! Aaah! (Of course, that was just a tiny example of what Derek likes to point out as "5th Grade Humor--har-de-har--both boy and building remained intact in my absence. But just in case, let's just hope that's our last Sick Day for a while....)

[*Derek reported with great amusement that when he trudged back to class to retrieve his backpack before leaving, his fellow students cheered, "Yay, Derek's back!" followed quickly by "Aww, he's going home!" Fortunately, Principal Rooney did NOT come by our house and catch him whiling away the academic day in his cozy Boy Cave, surrounded by snacks and scoping out the soccer broadcast...]