Tonite we put PJ to bed a little later because he had one of those rare, late afternoon naps from 3p – 5p. He fell asleep in the car on the way to Walmart. Anyway, Josh was struggling putting him to bed, I assisted to keep the ball rolling. Josh just finished his first week of Internal Medicine and is exhausted. And he’s on tomorrow for another 30+ hours.
Anyway, PJ (who is still not asleep at this moment) wasn’t quite tired when it was all said and done. He wanted me to read him another book. So I set him up with my nightstand lamp next to his bed and gave him a few books and said, “You can read for 15 minutes; then I’ll come back in and take the lamp away. But you must not touch the lamp.”
“OK, Momma.”
Naturally, I got busy trying to do the 100 things I had been thinking about all day. It was probably more like 25 minutes when I came by his room. He was on his knees on his bed, he looked up at me with saucer eyes, and said the tell-tale, “What, Momma?” Following is a shortened version of our conversation – the best I can remember it.
“What is it, PJ? Is something wrong?”
“The lamp shocked me, Momma!”
“Did you touch it?”
“No, it shocked me.”
“I think you must have burned yourself on it. You had to have touched it to get burned… What did you learn?”
“Nuthin.”
“Yes, you did. You learned that the light bulb is hot and you shouldn’t touch it.”
“Yeah.”
“Let me see your finger.” He held out his finger. I had a little white, round blister on it. “See, you burned it right there. See that white skin? That is where your skin died from being burned.”
Wrong thing to say. He got very worried and said, “Did my skin died? Am I dead?”
“No, honey. You aren’t dead. Just that little bit of skin there. And it will grow new skin under there and the old skin will fall off.”
Well, he started obsessing about the skin, wanted it off, didn’t want it be dead, wanted to fix it. Finally, he said, “Am I dead like Rodney’s dad? Will I be buried in the ground?” Rodney across the street lost his dad to cancer last month.
“No, baby. Not that kind of dead. Your skin is just fixing itself.”
He thought about it for a bit. Then said, “Did Rodney’s father die from touching a light bulb?”
“No, honey, he died from cancer.”
“Cancer?” repeated PJ.
“Yes, the doctors tried to fix it, but they couldn’t.”
“The doctors couldn’t fix it?” he repeated. Some more thinking. “Will I die?”
“Yes, baby. When you are old. We will all die someday when we are old or from an accident. That’s why dieing is so sad, because we won’t get to see that person until we die and go to heaven to be with Jesus.”
Thing digressed from there. But this is from the same kid that is throwing screaming fits during the day.
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