Chris is doing his marathon evening of classes (5:00-9:30) while the kids and I do bath night and laundry and nothing too especially spectacular, but this being our third one of these Tuesday nights this semester, I realize I’m beginning to really enjoy them. The kids are all a little easier on me in this the 8th month of what feels like a perpetual pregnancy…sensing that with dad away in the evening, I might be a bit more fragile than usual. Iris runs a bath for Owen and reads him a book. Micah brushes his teeth and puts himself to bed. Flynn comes in my room while I hang up laundry and chats with me…keeping me company. After retelling me what he most recently read in his Calvin and Hobbes comics, he asks if I want to see the injury he sustained earlier today while whittling a small block of cedar wood. “Yeah. Lemme see that”…realizing that when he told me about it earlier, he had already cleaned and bandaged it and therefore I never actually saw how bad the wound was. He holds out his finger. I said “You cleaned it? Right?” Both of us observing the dried blood around the small wound, he says “I did. But maybe I should clean it again.”
“Yeah. Go wash it. It’s gonna be fine.” Not immediately acting on my advice, Flynn drifts onto the next topic. “Mom, have you ever had a huge blister?”
“I can’t recall one lately, but I’m sure I have.”
“Like, did you ever have a blister from a burn.”
“Oh. Definitely.”
He stops bouncing on my bed long enough to reminisce…
“I remember once I had a big blister on my hand from the wood stove and this kinda weird kid in my first grade class said to me ‘Hey, could I get a little peek at your infection?'”
We both start laughing…mostly because of the weird, small voice that Flynn used to impersonate the boy…but also because at the ripe young age of a first grader, there is no awkwardness yet in expressing a compulsive interest in someone else’s “infection”. May he take that compulsion into some medical profession and be the very best in his field!