Commuter Mom: She's Gonna Need an Ocean

The other day I woke up to “Mommy, my eye hurts.” I didn’t really think anything of it at first, but then I got Commuter Girl into the light. Her eye was practically swollen shut and she had eight to ten big red bumps on her face and neck, a few on her hands, and two enormous bumps on her back. She looked like she had been in a boxing match, and hadn’t won.

I tend to be a “glass half full” kind of person when it comes to health issues. Mumps. Chicken pox. Hives. No, mosquitoes. There was a hungry mosquito trapped in her room overnight. I am working on the assumption that there was only one. I killed only one, and after what happened on Commuter Girl’s face I’d like to think that no other participating mosquito survived to brag about its evening feast. We made an appointment with the doctor to find out what to do since there were so many bites and they were so large. I’m proud to say that I did resist the urge to take the dead mosquito with me to the pediatrician’s office in case we should test it for West Nile.

After leaving the doctor’s office I took Commuter Girl with me to go to the pharmacy and pick up calamine lotion and Benadryl. I felt like I needed to give everyone an explanation…no, she didn’t get into a fight…it was a mosquito. The cashier felt so bad for her, she gave her a balloon. I felt so bad for her I bought her madelines and vanilla milk from Starbucks for breakfast, and spent most of the day playing with her in her water table.

Would it be weird to put mosquito netting over Commuter Girl’s bed?