Start of School and the End of Summer
Here I am declaring this the end of summer and the temperatures are hitting 100 nearly everyday (I think it’s been 12 days in a row now). But growing up, the beginning of school has always signaled the end of summer. It’s just that with schools constantly pushing up the start date, the end of the summer is really now occurring during the dog days of summer. Nevertheless, I am sticking with having “End of Summer” in the title as if somehow the heat will go away if I just declare it over on the blog here.
So the big news is that post ear tubes, it’s off to 1st grade for Grayson. Friday will conclude his first nearly full week of school. It’s nearly a full week because the first day was a half day. And it’s also not really full for him, because of what happened yesterday (Wednesday).
The quick (as possible) background is that we are on the 3rd school nurse since starting school last year. This nurse was only on day 3 of school, so everything is new for her. So lunch comes around and Grayson is around 220. She doses him for his lunch, but gives him no correction. After recess (around 1pm) he comes in to the nurses office complaining his stomach feels bad. She checks his sugar and it’s in the 300’s. So the nurse calls Becky and she talks her through the correction (and establishes what went wrong at lunch). The nurse then tells Grayson he can lay down for a few minutes while his stomach settles and the insulin starts to work.
Two hours later, the nurse calls Becky back up and tells her, “Well, he just woke up and is feeling a little better and I sent him back to class.” Just to review, that was hours and not minutes. Basically, he napped his way right through the afternoon.
Immediately, this concerned us because he’d already made statements like: “I don’t think I’m up for 1st grade, I just want to go home and play my video games. That’s more fun.” or “there aren’t any toys in there like kindergarten… I have to just sit there and listen… and it’s not even stuff I care about.” So if you add these statements to sleeping away his afternoon, that’s a little troubling. I talked to him man-to-1st grader and I attempted to make it clear that while I believed his stomach felt bad, that he was to not sleep in the nurses office and that while checking his sugar was good, ultimately, he can’t use diabetes as an excuse since most folks won’t really understand… especially as he gets older. Unfortunately, the gravity of what I was telling him was a little lost in translation.
“So I can’t talk about diabetes? I need to keep it a secret?”
“No, you can talk about it. That’s a good thing. But you can’t use that as an excuse to get out of stuff at school.”
“I can’t talk about it at school?”
“Yes, you can talk about it at school. And you can go to the nurses office to get your sugar checked if you feel bad. That’s all good. You just need to not sleep for 2 hours in there.”
“I slept for 2 hours? No, I didn’t,” he replied defiantly.
“The nurse called and told us that you did. From around 1 to 3. You missed a lot of class, and that’s just going to make it harder to catch back up.”
“I’m going to have more work to do?”
“Exactly… to catch back up.”
“No, I won’t. I mean, I didn’t today.”
“Buddy, just don’t let it happen again, okay?”
That seemed to stop the endless questions and sidetracks but he still maintains that he didn’t sleep in there for two hours. He was probably so tired that it felt like only a few minutes. I guess the transition from summer to school has been a little harder than we thought.
Fortunately, today went better, with him making it through a full day just fine (although his Bg’s were up in the 300’s again). Stupid diabetes, doesn’t it realize we’re trying to cope with 1st grade right now?