All Better

If you haven’t guessed by now, I really enjoy being a Poppa. 

I like the hugs and the kisses, the giggles and the songs, and the tickles and the grins. Of course, you can’t always have the good stuff. There are tantrums and tears, bonks and bruises, and the occasional sickness. It’s this last point that really makes Poppa-hood challenging.

Not challenging because there are times when you have to get up in the middle of the night and clean vomit off of sheets or change super-icky diapers… that’s my job. And it’s stuff I can control. The challenging part is the stuff you can’t control. Stuff like pain.

Because I’m the Poppa, I’m supposed to fix everything. But there are just some things that are out of my control. I can’t automatically make a fever go down or make an owie go away… And that’s frustrating.

A perfect example of this happened Friday. Just after 1pm, I get a call from daycare saying Finley had a temperature of 101 degrees and needs to come home. So, I did a quick little prep… made sure she had some pajamas ready to go, made sure the shades were down in her room, and that she had a sippee cup full of pedialight standing by. Then I went and picked her up.

Normally, when I go get my Finderella from daycare she’s overjoyed at seeing her Poppa and runs and jumps into my arms. Today, she was very happy to see me; she was just lethargic and obviously sick. When I lifted her up, her head immediately plopped on my shoulder, as if she had given up trying anymore and just wanted her daddy to take her home.

She was a bit warm, but not anything I felt was too terrible. The real problem was her cough. The poor thing just kept coughing and coughing and in the long run had a very, very sore throat. And as the afternoon went on into evening, her throat got worse and worse.

Right before bedtime was the peak. I could barely get her jammies on and she couldn’t keep her hands out of her mouth. My guess is that she was trying to reach whatever it was that was making her throat hurt. But that just made her more frustrated and cranky and crying certainly didn’t help.

For a very brief moment I felt helpless. She wasn’t going to fall asleep like this and this wasn’t something I could solve by rocking her. My only hope was medicine.

Heather had purchased some homeopathic cough syrup designed for toddlers that afternoon, but Finley wanted nothing to do with a spoonful of gunk. Luckily, I was able to dig up a squeeze dropper from our medicine box and was able to convince her to take it that way.

It wasn’t an immediate fix, but after a few minutes of rocking, she finally started to settle down. I knew that if she could just get some sleep, she’d get through the worst of it, and I was right. She was exhausted from trying to fight the fever and the sore throat, so once she was out, she was out for good.

The medicine did the trick for the next few days and she’s well on her way to recovery, but it was as hard on me as it was on her. Mainly because I didn’t feel like there was much I could do.

The number one thing we think about after our child comes into the world is how much we are going to protect him or her. But the reality is, there are just some things out of our reach. I wish I could take her pain every time she looks up at me with those sad eyes.

The good thing in all of this is that in some ways, as parents, we DO help take the pain away. Just being there, with our comforting arms and soft kisses on tear-stained cheeks does wonders for them… because they know they are safe and that we will try our very best to help them feel better. It’s us they run to when they fall down and it’s our kisses they want on their boo-boos.

I happen to know that those little kisses go a long way. How do I know? Because, yesterday, as I was sitting on the couch in shorts, Finley saw a scratch on my leg. She pointed to it and said “Daddy has an owie?” “Yes,” I said. “Daddy has an owie.” Then she promptly leaned over and kissed it. “All better,” she said. All better.