If You Give a Claire a Potato Chip

If you give a Claire a potato chip, she may start to exhibit symptoms.  Symptoms which might cause you to spaz and call the triage nurse at your doctor's office.  You might even curse a couple times when you find out that your doctor's on vacation.  The triage nurse might offer you an appointment in 15 minutes with the back-up doctor, to which you'll reply, "Do you think it's that serious??" and she'll say, "No, but I think you should get her checked out today..." and you'll be like, "Ok, but I'm not dressed."  You'll be horrified that it's 10:45 am and you just admitted that you weren't dressed to someone who has probably been at work since 7:30 am.  (In your defense, though, you will have been folding laundry all morning, which does not require clean, silky hair)

The triage nurse will give you an appointment at 2 pm.  Then you'll call your mom and she'll tell you that Claire has Celiac's disease and you'll spaz, thinking of all the birthday cake that your poor baby will miss out on if that's true.  Then you'll Google.

Never Google.

Just.  Step.  Away.  From.  The.  Google.

And by the time your dad (the nurse) takes his turn on Words With Friends, you'll be in full panic mode, wondering if 3 year olds can get Colon Cancer.

In your defense, you will have watched My Sister's Keeper the night before, and you'll still be pissed that they screwed up the ending and therefore the whole point of the damn story!  And you also might still be a little bit freaked out that something like that could happen to a child, and when you think about your kids in proximity to that thought, you might increase your blood pressure.

A lot.

So you'll frantically call Dad and say, "Thank God you're up, Claire has colon cancer!" and he'll be all, "No she doesn't," because your dad has known you for 33 years, and he knew you when you diagnosed yourself with prostate cancer.  And he'll say, "You know what really screws me up?  That Olestra stuff..." and then you'll remember.

You fed her the Pringles.

The ones with Olestra.

And that caused the mucus.

That caused all the panic.

And when you call at 1 pm to cancel your 2 pm appointment, they might laugh at you, but at least they won't charge you the penalty.

Because if they charge you the penalty, Claire will probably want a potato chip to go with it.



(In other news, Mary Grace lotteried into the charter school.  We're still hoping for the neighborhood school, but it's nice to have a choice - between the charter school and continuing one more year of preschool at our current school, that is - for pretty much the last time between now and college.)