Thursday, February 05, 2009

Alpha Parent

In my quest to begin blogging again I made the decision to not spend a lot of time bitching and instead celebrate the little things that go on here.
Fuck that.
So it is winter and my little princess (who just turned 3!) is sick. At 12:23 am on January 17th the coughing started. I don't ever mean to be that mom who rushes to the doctor with every sniffle sneeze and cough, but the last 2 winters have brought pneumonia to my babe's lungs and I want things to be different this year. So at her 3 year check up the doc (told me she was overweight*) prescribed an antibiotic for a lingering sinus infection which was supposed to stop the nighttime coughing (and vomiting due to coughing). This eased things a bit, but she still sounds like Typhoid Mary (I need a shirt for her that says "I'm Not Contagious!"). She is also a total pain in the ass.
At first I was thinking that it was that she is just a willful 3 year old, but I really don't think that is it. I think the antibiotics are messing with her. I think that the issues she has had at school and with her sister are because she doesn't feel right, and when you don't feel right you don't act right. Right? While I don't think she is asthmatic, I think she is having a reaction to this medicine and it needs to be addressed.
My co parent disagrees. He believes that she is just a terrible stubborn child who refuses to do anything for herself and that she needs to be disciplined. (Question: How do you discipline a child who is in a vicious cycle of hysterics because she can't calm down enough to regulate her breathing which causes her to cough which causes her to vomit which causes her hysterics?)

Which leads me to my point: I am the alpha parent. I am the one who gets up with the darlings, who schedules the darlings, who nurtures the darlings, who kisses boo boos, who makes sippy cups of milk and provides the "best water from the fridge", who dresses them, cleans them, and who plays seemingly endless games of Candy Land, the Duckie Game, and Uno. I am the one who has learned all the words to High School Musical 3 and Free to Be You and Me so that when the CD skips I can keep singing. I am the one who tucks them in on the countless nights that he works late, and I am the one who makes the medical decisions.
I am not asking for an award, or a vacation, or anything, really, just an acknowledgment of the fact that I might know when our kids need discipline versus when they need to be held and rocked and loved.

So really I have no point, I just needed to get it out there that, in fact, I do sometimes know what I am doing when I am not reprimanding a frightened little tot who has just puked her guts up (all over me) and instead of a time out I am giving her a little TLC.

Sometimes I hate co-parenting.

*So my doc told me that he is not worried that she is overweight, but that I should try to curb the upward trend in her weight to height ratio. He told me the same thing with the other one too. So my stalker tendencies kicked in and I decided to check him out on facebook. Here is what I learned: the good doctor who is so worried about the upward trend of Nora's weight has two little chub-scouts of his very own as well as a wife who looks like she knows her way around the ice cream truck. So here is what I have to say to him... Make sure no one eats in front of the TV and that you are providing plenty of fruits and vegetables as well as whole grains at every meal. Also make sure that you all do some vigorous activity, like dancing or bike riding, every day....

1 comment:

Christy said...

Hi there! Nice to read your blog again. I'm sorry to hear that Nora is sick. It sounds like your insticts are right on with Nora. As far as Tim goes... hmmmm.... that's tough. Can you gently say something like, "Your diagnosis of this situation would mean more to me if you started spending significantly more time with her and still came to the same conclusion"? Not sure how to say that gently, but maybe?