So, Imogen wakes up with a stomach ache this morning. Stomach aches are so vague. There's not a lot you can do for them, their causes are mysterious and they're hard to verify. Is it diarrhea or apendi-whatever? Is it a stomach flu or a cleverly chosen, unprovable, difficult to solve symptom of simply wishing to stay home? A fever, I can handle. The kid is hot, or she is not. Easy. We have the magic number (98.6 or 96.8, I can never remember...) and we have the magic thermometer that tells us (provided it has not again been misplaced). And we have Tylenol to fix it. (I have a hard time inflicting pepto bismol on a person I like. Some cures are worse than the disease.)
So I told Imogen she could stay home from school. I had one final and it wasn't till tonight, so it was no inconvenience to me. However, she came to me 20 minutes later (20 minutes past when she should have been getting dressed according to my oft-ignored morning schedule that only I care about) and announced that her stomach felt much better and she would be going to school. She was in her uniform, and I do use the word "in" loosely in this context. Her shirt untucked and unbuttoned, socks of drastically differing lengths and hair still messy. Still, this was all fixable within the allotted time, though I had to tell Genevieve to get dressed. She seemed to think a day at home was as good a reason as any to spend it nude.
Imogen school called me at around 2:45, not long before I would have left to pick her up anyway. Her stomach hurt, they said, and I needed to come get her. When I arrived they explained that she had seemed kind of down all day long but refused to complain and finally the teacher noticed her clutching her stomach and flinching.
So here I have a child who, instead of pretending to be ill to stay home from school, when sick, will pretend to be well so she can go to school.
That makes me happy.
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