Sometimes things can just kind of move along and it is almost possible to forget (or at least put in the back of your mind) that your daughter has only been home just over a year. Sometimes she does so well and is so much a part of our family, that it is almost hard to remember that she hasn't always been with us.
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But a couple of weeks ago when I was sick and out of commission it was very hard on Rylee. When she is not at school, I am always with her and she just did not know how to handle Mama laying on the couch and not being able to get up. For those of you that don't know me that well - I am desperately slightly germophobic. I did not want Rylee to get the stomach flu and so wouldn't let her in the room with me. She would come in the room and stand by the door with her hands stretched out towards me with a barely audible "Mama... Mama... I want you... I really want you!" I will spare you the gory details and just say that there was no way that I could get up or even away from the bucket that I was wrapped around. But no matter how sick you are, you can't just see your child needing you and not try to do something.
So I asked my husband to go pick up masks for the girls so that they could come in the room and not breath in "my" germ(y) air. He had a strange look on his face, but he went anyway :) This was my second round with this bug - so I didn't for one minute believe that you can't get the flu after you have already had it. Unfortunately the mask was just way too big for Rylee's little face and she couldn't stay in very long. She cried when Daddy took her out of the room, and I felt even worse!
I knew that this was hard on Rylee, but I didn't realize just how hard it was until the second day. I went outside to meet the bus and as she came around the front of the bus I immediately noticed the little "penguin shuffle". She waddled over to me shouting "MAMA... MAMA... da da ba ba ma ma". I knew this wasn't good - penguin waddle and baby talk... She did these same things when we were in China and she first came to us.
Poor sweetie - I can only imagine what was going through her head. After a couple of days she asked me "Mama, you member that time when you was in the couch, an you was sick - do you member that Mama?" (as if I could forget that easily) "Well Mama - maybe you would get dead!"
Ack... I should be more prepared for these things, I should have known that she might be worried about this - but we have not talked about death yet. While she has a giant vocabulary, language comprehension takes so much longer and some things can be hard to explain still. I should have realized that she would be worried about losing me. We talked about how people get sick and then usually get better, but suddenly she is talking about dying a lot.
Something good that I think has come out of all of this is that she is really trying to vocalize her questions and think about the answers.
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