September and Everything After

So yesterday my biggest worry about going back to college happened.

Kelly came home sick from school. (Only she really wasn’t sick but I’ll go into that later.)

Nowadays professors have strict rules about cell phone usage during class and for a good reason. In one of my first day classes, I watched a girl text the entire time. How rude! Plus why would someone pay thousands of dollars for these classes and then ignore the whole lecture? So anyways my phone was on silent in my purse yesterday.

And the nurse called. And my sister called after the nurse called her. (She’s the emergency contact.) And G called because the nurse called him. And of course, I didn’t see any of this until my 1.5 hour lecture was over. By that time, Sarah had left work and picked up Kelly from school. Oy…

See this is my biggest worry. I know I can do the work. I know I can find the money to pay for this. I know that I have the drive and determination to finish. But I can’t physically be in two places at once (in class and at home with sick kids). And this stresses me out.

Two of my neighbors have offered to pick up sick kids if this happens again (actually one of them is the second emergency contact). And it’ll be okay, I know this but I don’t like asking for help or putting people out of their way for me (I have issues, I’m working on that). I know I can’t really do it ‘all alone’ but it’s hard to let go of the control.

Back to Kelly… She was not sick. She slipped out of the house without eating breakfast (I think tying her shoes distracted her or something) and about mid-morning her tummy hurt. Any kid sent to the office has their temperature taken. And hers was 99.2 But in the course of eating her saltine crackers, it went up to 99.7 and that meant an automatic “Go straight home, do not pass Go, do not collect $200″. It’s a new rule, if the temp goes up .4 in less than an hour, the kid is sent home. The nurse is a sweet elderly lady too and definitely knows “sick” but her hands are tied with new regulations. 99 isn’t even considered a fever in my book so I’m rather frustrated with the whole mess. Of course as soon as I got home, Kelly was bored and why can’t she play the computer and why can’t she go outside and how long til the kids come home and why can’t she go back to school…

So I’m going to send all my professors a quick email about this. I’m going to keep my phone on vibrate and in my pocket and will only answer calls from the school. And I’ll leave the room to do so, of course. Because in yesterday’s case, there was no reason for Sarah to leave work, I could have been home in half an hour or called one of my neighbors. I just need to coordinate better.

And also, I’ve now threatened the kids with the loss of their Wii, computer, friends, DS’s, and library trips, that if they aren’t puking or broken a bone, they are not allowed in the nurses office for the rest of the year… *

* (Yes, I will not send them to school in the first place if they really are sick. But hungry and a slightly elevated temperature is not sick!)

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 8:07 am and is filed under Kids X 5, School, Work, What?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.