My kids are tasty.

Both kids, (daughter, 13; son, 8 ) are vulnerable to mosquito bites.

And, in the past month, as our house remodel hit its final, frenzied stage, they’ve slept in rooms with windows open and no screens. (As I write this I see the bogosity of my logic; the screens have nothing to do with the construction. Whatever.)

Anyway, while sleeping, both kids — coma-esque and only partly clothed — become buffet lines for creatures (mosquitoes, spiders, wolves) that make their living swilling human blood.

In the morning (or, in the daughter’s case, mid- to late-morning) both kids wake itching and cranky and holding out limbs. They point at and count and compare huge welts/lumps/splotches/sores.

Then they start scratching.

And that’s where I come in.

“Dad, I’m scratching right up next to the bump. The bump isn’t getting bloody or anything. But then it just makes me want to scratch more…”

(Being bitten by bugs, I’ll note, does nothing good for their IQs.)

They tell me because they want — get this — medical attention.

I can’t stress enough the deep irony in this. I’m not particularly nurturing. And, worse, I am deathly afraid of illness and/or pain of any kind. I last visited a physician in the 1990s. I acknowledge illness roughly once a decade. And, when I do, I tend to follow the “hurl outside the car and keep driving” school of medicine.

So, when needing medical attention of any kind, the kids have turned to the more nurturing creatures in our house - their mother, their grandmother, their cats, the turtle, etc….

No more.

The bug bite issue, they’ve decided, is something for Dad.

“Can you make it stop?”

That’s the 8-year-old. I tell him we have a saw, in the back, and we can remove his arm. He says he’s serious; He wants help.

Weird, huh.

So I go to this place in our house, a drawer, with, like, medical products in it. It’s amazing. There’s all kinds of stuff in there; bandages and tape and sprays and… I dunno, it’s an unusual drawer.

And, while searching around in there, I find a can that says something like “Spray on This Crap for Bug Bites.”

So I do.

And he feels better. And he smiles. And he tells his sister, who comes to me for, get this, the same thing.

And then she feels better.

God, now they’re gonna want a sandwich

Posted in: Dad: The Musical - Andre Mouchard • The Dad Bloggers |

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