A mother's day of mothering

It's been a classic sick-kid week. H got sick out of the blue last Friday. Mid-morning, she spiked a fever and was clingy and cranky all day, not eating much (odd for her). The next morning she was outright sick, throwing up. I put her on the BRAT diet (no, it doesn't refer to the kid, though it may seem like it for the way sick kids act). Bananas, Rice, Apple Sauce, Toast. All we got for it was a lot of apple sauce on the carpet.

Sunday - Mother's Day - she seemed better and was hungry, so she had cereal with milk. All seemed well for hours, so we went for a late lunch out after her nap. That was a true parent moment: We arrived at the nice restaurant, everyone was pleasant, then H threw up right in the main hallway. We ended up going home, and hubby went back to the restaurant to pick up our food to go. The folks there were still pleasant, but I doubt that would have lasted long if we'd stayed!

Needless to say, my blood sugar was hard to control through all this - mostly running low. I kept having to sneak food when H wasn't looking, because she'd demand to eat some of it. Eating our takeout, I had to stop several times to take care of her, as did dear Hubby. I don't know how I would do it without him. In fact, I keep imagining single moms, and imagining that more than one of them must be diabetic, and some of those type 1. How do you do it?

The pump is great in that it allows me to, say, wait an extra hour for lunch. But once I've plugged in the (extra, bolus) insulin for a meal, I need to eat pretty quickly. My control is perhaps too good with the pump, because I can go low pretty fast if I don't eat soon enough after that bolus, or if I suddenly chase my daughter up the stairs and around for a while - any little extra, unexpected activity will do it. It's hard to account for that in your insulin settings, so I just keep a close eye on things and eat when I have to. That took all my spare moments these past few days, when I wasn't trying to figure out what was happening with H, holding her, or frantically trying to find something she could eat.

So, she ended up on liquids - and even some of those didn't stick - for a day before gradually pulling out of it. Oddly, no one around her had anything like it. We were lucky our pediatrician is available 7 days a week; the doc on call saw us on Sunday (yes, I was doing a lot of true mothering on Mother's day! And so was the doctor. Bless her.) Of course my thoughts ran to all sort of problems, including diabetes, but H wasn't peeing a lot (just the opposite), so I was pretty confident it wasn't that, and the doc didn't find signs of anything else serious.

Now, we're back to our usual routine, and I'm grateful - grateful for all the whining for more food, the requests to play, the potty-training cajoling and the continued diaper changes. It's all wonderful, really! I have always been grateful for H. Is it possible to be more grateful than most moms, because of all I had to do to get her? Perhaps no more than folks who've had to adopt, or who went through lots of IVF or had other trouble before finally landing their sweet package from heaven. But certainly no less. And when anything goes awry, I nearly panic (though I'm good at pretending to be in control). I'm glad to be breathing easier.

I'm also grateful for everyone in our lives who helps - Hubby, of course (who deserves the capital H), and also grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts and -uncles, cousins, friends, doctors, caregivers, etc. I'm grateful for that village of ours. I highly recommend cultivating whatever relationships you've got; it's really the only way to raise a kid, whether you have diabetes or not.