"I Don't Want to GO to School"!

As parents we all have heard this phase one or twice in the early mornings getting ready for school "I don't want to go to school today".

Having 6 kids, 4 of which are in school I have become quite good at ignoring this request and shoving my little bundles of joy out the door to their school bus every morning. HOWEVER when that child is a Type 1 diabetic and saying "I don't want to go to school today" boy that's something that you just can't ignore.

You can't just throw on their clothes, try to give them breakfast (if they don't eat it too bad for them), wash their hands and face, brush their hair and teeth, put on their jackets, hats, boots and back-pack and send them out the door.

NO there is 3 very important things that I must do for Cara before she can go anywhere. She must eat, she must have her insulin and she must get dressed. Anything else that gets done is just icing on the cake! lol

So first step: Eating, I must make sure that Cara eats all her breakfast, which this morning went from cereal with milk to just apple sauce really fast. Cara did not want to go to school and she knows that she is not going or doing anything until she has the right amount of carbs in that little belly of hers. And because apple sauce is easier to slide down her throat when she refuses to eat, we have learned that during night time lows, apple sauce for breakfast it was. However I have never given apple sauce for breakfast. It has always been just for snack, so I was a little worried about that. It did slow me down, and I did have to take sometime to make sure that I was making the right choice of hurrying her along to get her to school but I knew that her nurse will be at the school to take her BG at 9:30am. So back to getting this kid ready for school. 35grams of Apple sauce all down...Check!

Step Two: Insulin time, usually she eats before I give her the injection of insulin that keeps her functioning and ALIVE . But especially this morning when she is refusing to eat we had to wait until she was all done that apple sauce to make sure she has enough carbs to cover the insulin that I'm about to inject into her system. Insulin is usually a breeze with Cara. It has not always been like this and of course on a day that she did not want to go to school she was whining and moving all over the place....not an easy task giving insulin to a moving object! However insulin....Check!

Step Three: Getting dressed, In the morning we always keep Cara in her pj's until injection time, it is just easier to give the injection when there are no clothes to get in the way, so that means she needs to eat, then injection, the get dressed. Normally Cara will get herself dress with just a little bit of help from me, help doing up the buttons and putting the socks on. But today a day that she did not want to go to school and she knows that we are on a very tight time schedule to make the bus she was like dead weight trying to get her dressed. But we did get her dressed and it even matched.....Check!

It really is a fine working, oiled machine getting a T1 child ready for school and one little phase really puts a wrench in that machine. Not to mention that we also had 2 other kids that we where trying to ignore their pleads of not going to school and get them out the door too.

Just a side note Cara was feeling fine, she just missed 4 days of school the week earlier and her BG # was perfect..... so really she just did not want to go because of laziness and no other reason!! If there was a REAL reason I would have let her stay home, it is just way too much work getting her on the bus just to get a phone call in 30mins to come pick up my sick kid!