Buzz

The big news of the day? Master J just got himself stung by a bee for the first time in his whole 9 years.

I'm tap, tap, tapping away at the keyboard and hear a screech so loud I thought the neighbour's cat had mauled another of our friendly visiting pigeons and left it where the kids could stand on it. Instead I see J clutching his neck like he'd been stabbed. I'm freaking out - at this point I didn't know what had happened and if you know anything about J, you'd know his reactions are understated rather than overstated. To hear any kind of pain response out of him means something pretty major. He vaguely mentioned being stung by something and a quick look in the vicinity turned up a bee dying a slow (and, I hope, painful) death in the grass.

None of the kids have ever been stung before and the last time I was stung was - um - something like 24 years ago so I was a bit rusty on my bee sting info. Google filled in the missing links. The stinger wasn't in the skin so that was cool and the swelling was pretty minor, around the level of a mosquito bite, but the sting was right on the side of his neck near all those scary major arteries, so we'll monitor him for the rest of the night and see how we go. Google Image also provided us answers to the question 'What if he's allergic?' as well - not pretty.

The funniest part of all of this (if I can say that without sounding like a horrid, horrid mother) was when J, upon seeing the bee dying on the ground, became convinced that he too would die. What would have taken two minutes to explain to a neuro-typical kid took the better part of half an hour, LOL.

No son, you won't die. But that nasty bee did, and it serves him right!

Cheers,
Lizzie