Comedy Hour: Well-Child Checkup

Welcome to comedy hour here at No Ordinary Family! In this segment I will relate to you a hilarious story about the time I took three young children to the doctor's office solo. If you're a parent of three or more kids, this will sound mighty familiar to you. If you're not a mom, make sure you're sitting down. If you're pregnant (especially with your second or third child), definitely be sitting down (take is easy, girlfriend!) and don't worry, you'll learn to appreciate this kind of humor.

Last week was my son's two year well-child checkup. I hate the doctor, but I love my kids, so I take them to be tortured to make sure they're healthy. Unfortunately, I ended up having to take all three kids by myself. What I know of doing anything (especially if it's "an outing") with three kids so far is to lower your expectations about as far as they can go. So in my mind, the visit would have gone well if we,
a) Made it to the doctor's office, and,
b) Saw the doctor, and,
c) All made it home alive.
I used to have ideas about "cleanliness" and "good behavior" and "being on time," but experience and a lack of sleep have taken those from me, along with my dignity and short-term memory. (Although one thing I can remember is my son sitting on my lap last week poking my still-soggy post-baby tummy and saying "beep!" over and over again. I laughed with him and cried on the inside. No dignity. Anyway...)

In the car, I mentally prepped my kids for the general order of events and what the doctor would do, trying to glaze over the fact that my son would be stabbed with a needle multiple times. This has worked well in the past, but this time it caused my daughter to start crying. Was her tender heart sorry for her little brother? No. She was "sad because I'm not getting a shot so I don't get to pick a treat. Waaauuuuhhh!" We hadn't even made it out of the car.

But- would you believe it? We made it to the doctor's office on time! Early, even! I used the old Jedi mind-trick of setting my phone alarm too early. The waiting room was filled with silent adults. My kids headed to the corner with the toys, where there happened to be no other children, and proceeded to be adorable. Strangers smiled in our direction. Score.

I took Matthew out of his car seat and he smiled at me from my lap and all the strangers smiled at our adorable family. But then I smelled a smell. A smelly smell. A smelly smell that smelled... smelly. It was the diaper of my own smiling baby. Taking him to the bathroom would be a gamble, because I had no idea if our name was going to be called in two minutes or twenty. As it happened, at that moment, Diana announced she needed to go potty anyway. So I pried an unwilling Liam away from the germ-infested toys to go to the germ-infested bathroom. (I forgot to mention that our family doctor's office shares a waiting room with the Urgent Care center.) Our MO in public restrooms is for the kids to stand in a corner NOT TOUCHING ANYTHING until we exit the stall. But since I was alone, with two hands occupied with Diana and then changing Matthew, they sensed my weakness and would not stay put, so we were exposed to an unknown number of germs and diseases.

We left the bathroom and the kids bolted over to the germ-infested toys where a little girl was playing with some foam letters and proceeded to jointly rip them from her. I didn't see it, but I heard her protest. They know we don't grab. I don't know why they had taken leave of their senses and had chosen to forget that fact in a waiting room full of silent adults who had nothing better to do than watch the noisy children. So I called them over to me and used my best "You'd better shape up or you're in big trouble" death-whisper. It seemed to work, because they played relatively peacefully for the rest of the HOUR that we spent waiting for the doctor. However, in that time, Matthew began to cry more insistently. I began to get set up to feed him when, of course, the nurse came out and called Liam's name.

Liam is a very outgoing boy, and very happy, and loves people. But as if he could sense our malicious purpose, he suddenly shrank from the nurse. He followed me into the back, but his cooperative good nature was overcome by fear and a murky memory of the horrors he had experienced at the doctor's office before, and he fell to pieces. I had to hold him with me on the scale, which meant the nurses had to get my weight first. (Newsflash: it's not my pre-baby weight.) Matthew was fussing, but I couldn't feed him because for the rest of the exam, I had to hold Liam on my lap or wrestle him bodily on the exam table. At least I wasn't pregnant for that part. He might not have been able to hear Liam's heart well, but the doctor confidently said he had "very healthy lungs." He had to shout his list of standard questions ("Can he stack blocks by himself?" "Does he have a vocabulary of more than 20 words?" Etc.) over the sound of Matthew yelling and Liam sobbing, but I think all the answers were satisfactory. Meanwhile Diana was taking off her shoes and dropping them on the floor under chairs, asking to read the magazines and trying to explore the drawers under the exam table. Still, I kept my cool. What else could I do, really? We were basically a loud three-ring circus. At some point it all just becomes hilarious.

What's that, you say? There's room for more chaos? You're right! As the doctor was finishing the exam and going to fetch the nurse to administer Liam's vaccinations, Diana announced she had to go potty. Again. And of course there was no way Liam was going to wait with Matthew in the exam room while I took her. So off we took our whole flipping circus of four to another germ-infested bathroom. Liam kept dropping his blanket on the floor and then picking it up and putting it in his mouth, but I couldn't do anything about that because I was holding Diana on the potty. Matthew provided the soundtrack for the whole event. As luck would have it, it was a FALSE ALARM, which I love. However, I took the opportunity to put up Diana's hair since it had been falling into her face. This caused her to loudly yell, "Ouch, Mommy! Stop! Stop it! You're hurting me! Stop!" Which is, of course, an awesome thing to have coming from a child with you in a closed bathroom- if you want to be investigated by Child Protective Services. She also remembered my promise that Liam could pick out a treat after he got shots and began wailing because she wasn't going to get shots. Of course. Out we went, back to the exam room, poor ignored Matthew still yelling. Liam was very happy to see the cool Band-Aids the nurses showed him, but when he saw the needles the jig was up. (Happily, when Diana saw the needles, her eyes got big and she stopped whining and declared that she didn't want a shot or subsequent treat.) More twisting, screaming, and wrestling, despite gentle assurances from me trying to remind him of all the good things to come after the shots.

I dislike doctors in general, but I love, love, love nurses. They prove to me every time we go to the doctor's office (which is fairly often now that we have three kids) that there are good people who care about others out there, even in a medical setting. When the deed was done, the very sweet nurses offered Liam his choice of stickers, and he stopped crying right away. Meanwhile, Matthew is still crying, Diana is asking me goodness-knows-what, and I'm just sitting there like,

We packed our circus up and walked out past the waiting room full of silent adults who had certainly heard what sounded like two children being murdered in the back room. Out at the car, I let the kids climb around in their seats while I finally fed my longsuffering Matthew. He sat up and smiled at me, and out of sheer joy and gratitude, spit up probably almost everything I'd fed him all over himself, my shoulder, arm, jeans, and the passenger seat. I cleaned him up, ordered the kids into their car seats, and as I was putting him into his car seat, I noticed that the strange feeling from my shoe meant, yep, I'd stepped in gum. And tracked it into the car.

We got there, we saw the doctor, we all got out alive. It went well.

Fin.

(P.S. I've learned my lesson and am actively looking for people to watch my older two during Matthew's four month checkup this week.)