Day: August 31, 2007

Off of the roof

By / August 31, 2007 / 1 Comment

After a day of accomplishing nothing much, I had finally gotten moving and was cleaning out the Linen closet. I’d just found left over “new baby” supplies from Patches’ birth 4 years ago, when Neighborchild came running in to tell me that Gleek had fallen off the roof of our playset. We have a big redwood playset.
That roof is at least 12 feet off the ground.
I ran.

Gleek is okay.
It was apparent that she was okay within 60 seconds of my arrival next to her. But I still needed to go through all the triage checks to be absolutely sure. There are children who will suffer broken bones with hardly a whimper. It would not surprise me if Gleek is one of these. I was starting all the “move this arm, move that arm” checks when Kiki felt impelled to scold Gleek for being on the roof. Gleek screeched at being scolded. Then Kiki felt that Gleek was not learning the right lesson from this experience and tried to elaborate. I did not have either girl’s attention. I attempted to continue to soothe Gleek and check her injuries, but it was difficult with Kiki declaring that Gleek was just bruised and Gleek screeching at every word that came out of Kiki’s mouth. I knew that all this scolding from Kiki was merely her fear finding an outlet. I tried to explain this to her and get her to stop interfering with what I needed to do. In fact I told Kiki in very clear terms to be quiet. But she stood there and I could tell that she was going to speak again. So I ordered her into the house. I knew it would hurt Kiki’s feelings, but I’d spent 5 minutes arguing with Kiki that I should have spent focused on Gleek.

With Kiki gone I was able to do all the limb checks. Nothing appears broken, although she’ll have some bruises. I was also able to get Gleek to tell me exactly how she fell. She described hitting the swing crossbar with her arm on the way down. This information prompted me to check her armpit where I found the largest of her injuries. She is thoroughly scraped there. She hadn’t even felt it hurting until we found it. She wanted to see the injury, so I brought her inside to a mirror. When she saw the scrape, the enormity of What Could Have Happened hit Gleek. Suddenly she understood that she really could have broken an arm or a leg or her head. Gleek burst into tears and needed more cuddling. I let her talk and snuggle as long as she needed, then settled her to watch Link play a video game.

I then went to talk to Kiki. First I apologized for sending her away. Then I explained to her that when someone is injured there is a process that they have to go through to assimilate what happened to them. During the first shock phase it is important to not confuse the patient with too many people talking. It is also very important to listen to everything because it gives you clues about what to check. Gleek needed to tell her story without interruption for me to know to check under her arm. I explained to Kiki that she was trying to force the realization of danger on Gleek before Gleek was ready to hear it. Later Gleek didn’t need the lecture at all because she made her own realizations. That was even better, because the things we realize for ourselves stick with us longer than things we have merely heard from others. In short I tried to explain how I was handling the crisis and how Kiki had been interfering with my crisis management. Kiki isn’t mad at me anymore. She nodded intently when I asked if she understood what I was trying to explain. I lay even odds that she’ll still interfere the next time Gleek has a crisis. Kiki feels a responsibility to help raise Gleek and I keep having to tell Kiki to back off and let me be the mom. That maternal instinct is a good thing. I just need to help Kiki channel it in ways that are constructive to the sister relationship rather than destructive.

Later tonight I expect Gleek to be achy and sore. She may also need extra hugs and loving at bedtime. Nightmares are a possibility. I’ll actually welcome all those things if they teach Gleek to be more cautious about climbing.
Today could have gone much worse.

Fingerprinting

By / August 31, 2007 / 13 Comments

I spoke with the people who are organizing the after school program for which I’ll be teaching. It turns out that in order to be a teacher I’ll have to be finger printed and get a background check. This is done to prevent predators or dangerous people from working closely with the kids. For some reason this process makes me nervous even though I know I’ll pass with flying colors. So I’m going to poke around in my brain a little to see if I can locate the source of this nervousness.

As of right now I am not in any kind of law enforcement database that I know of. I’ve never been fingerprinted for anything. This means that if my prints turned up as part of an investigation, the prints would remain unidentified because the investigators have no way to tie those prints to me. The thought of putting my prints in a database makes me antsy. What if somehow it leads to me being falsely accused of something? I’m not even going to pretend that fear is rational. I have never been a part of a criminal investigation and hopefully never will be. Not only that, but I seriously doubt that the school district database is connected to any criminal database.

Then there is the fear of mistaken identity. I know that my background is clean. The only run-in I’ve had with The Law is when I got a citation for being an idiot and causing a traffic accident. That was 12 years ago. But there is a chance that someone else with my name has a much more colorful past. This actually happened to my brother. He was nearly arrested because he has the same first and last name as a person for whom a warrant had been issued. Since that first time he has had similar trouble several times. At least now he knows to alert people to the existence of that other guy with his name. I know there is another Sandra Taylor in the area. She shops at the same pharmacy that I do and doesn’t have insurance. Fortunately her last name has an “o” rather than an “e” and now the pharmacists know me on sight. (It just now occurs to me to wonder if my insurance ever got billed for her prescriptions, since several times I was almost charged her uninsured full price for mine.) But what if this same kind of mix-up happens during the background check? Logically I know it would get sorted out. The worst that could happen is that I’m told I can’t teach the class.

This kind of fingerprinting and background check is done all the time. My brother and his wife have gone through it to be foster parents. Likely anyone who has adopted has gone through it. Many companies require background checks. But I’ve spent 34 years flying under the radar and it makes me nervous to pop up where I can be seen.

Weird. I probably just need to get it over with.