The In-Between Times

Toddler has a mystery spot on her wrist. And not the fun kind of mystery spot you visit on a detour to somewhere more interesting.

It started a couple nights ago. She was in the bath, normally the highlight of her day, when she suddenly started shrieking and flailing her arms. We finished the bath as quickly as we could, and started drying her off.

It was then that we noticed it, a large, raised, angry, red mark on the inside of her wrist.

In all honesty, it looked like a burn, except she wasn’t in any situation to be burned. She had been in the bath a full ten minutes before this happened, a bath she shared with her sister who was just fine. In fact, Preschooler was completely oblivious to her sister’s pain, in the presence of all those bubbles. And we weren’t bathing Toddler in a cauldron of boiling oil (we learned our lesson the first time with that.)

Even though the mystery spot was raised, it wasn’t a hive. I know hives. All Preschooler and I need to do is look at a bottle of amoxicillin, and we morph into itchy red she-beasts.

We decided maybe it was a bug bite. According to my Mother-in-Law, when Husband was a child, he would get a dramatic reaction to every little mosquito bite. We gave Toddler some Benedryl and sent her packing. By this time she was running her usual course of havoc and mayhem anyways.

The mystery spot seemed to calm down over the next couple days, until last night.

We just finished dinner, when suddenly the shrieking returned. We looked to see several blisters oozing with fluid from her mystery spot.

Uh-oh.

So instead of our usual evenings of playing the virginal while Papa read from the Bible, we packed the whole family into the minivan, and headed to urgent care. The reason I dragged Husband and Preschooler along was that ever since her 18 month appointment, where Toddler received no less than six shots, she’s had an inordinate fear of doctors. It takes at least two adults so some one in a white coat can do something as heinous as listen to her heart beat.

After a three-hour wait, which by the way is not so fun when you’re not on the S.S. Minnow, we finally saw a doctor.

“Let’s call it contact dermatitis. I don’t really know what it is,” declared the doctor.

Contact dermatitis, maybe in response to the nondescript Elmo bubble bath we used, even though the girls bathed in those bubbles ten times without incident.

Diagnosis: Mystery Spot.

And so, once again, I find myself writing during what I like to call the in-between times. In-between fixing breakfast, and changing diapers, and presiding over such conflict negotiations over who gets the flower plate versus the monkey plate, and whether one child has more grapes than the other. At 5:30 in the morning, and 10:00 at night. A sentence while sitting in the waiting room. A thought scribbled on the kitchen white-board while washing dishes. Typing with one hand while a sick child lounges on my lap.

Writing in-between life. Like every other mother before me.