The Boy has his preschool booster jabs this afternoon. I thought it was bad enough taking my unsuspecting 8 week old bubba along two weeks ago – there she was, happily feeding when boomf! Needle ambush in her fat little thigh. And then they did it again! Poor poppet.
I thought that it might be easier taking The Boy along. He’s old enough that I can explain things to him so he knows what’s coming and that didn’t seem so bad, but then I thought – Crap! He’s gonna know what’s coming! I’ll have to restrain a screaming three year old (and a bloody muscley one at that), especially when they come to doing injection number two.
I may be wrong, it may go swimmingly and I’m worrying for nothing, but I couldn’t just spring it on him, I wanted to give him some advance warning and try to explain why they’re necessary and that, as with many ” ‘splainin’ ” things, was a tricky balance to strike between honesty and tmi.
Why has he got a willy and his sister doesn’t?
What has she got?
How are babies made?
How will/did the baby get out of your tummy?
Why we do a poo?
Why is the mouse dead?
Will all the children at my preschool die? (I blame The Man for his Buddhist explanation of ‘we’ll all die’ for this one)
Why Grandpa grumpy?
All tricky questions to answer but so far I feel like I’ve navigated my way fairly successfully (except for the last one. Nobody really knows the answer to that). I prefer to go the route of absolute honesty and just try to simplify it to an age appropriate level. You can generally gauge receptiveness by the point at which he goes “Oh – a shiny” and runs off in the middle of my carefully thought-out explanation to play with whatever has caught his attention (trains, duplo, a toilet roll in need of unravelling…)
Luckily someone saved me a lot of work with the innoculations talk and made this great Get Well Soon episode, “Inject to protect”. Gods bless the Beeb. Now all I have to do is promise a sticker, some chocolates and some godawful kiddy magazine that I normally steer him carefully away from near the tills in the supermarket. Bribery for the word!
And? How DID it go? 🙂
Very little drama. Incredibly proud of my brave boy 🙂