My kid went through ancient Chinese torture

I love long weekends but this one is turning out to be the worst long weekend ever. Now I wish it was a short weekend. First, Tru was taken ill with a flu of the most massive proportions. Then I broke my specs so it’s got a huge crack on the right lens and it keeps slipping off my nose and I have to keep pushing it back up like some gawky kid (the husband wants me to fix it asap as I also apparently look like the victim of domestic abuse.  And Kirsten has been terribly cranky, refusing to sleep and screaming away for extended periods.

After hearing a lot of good stuff about traditional chinese medicine, we decided to bring Tru for a consult. Believe it or not, the doctors are called physicians and this one had a particularly deadly name – Peng Ya Ling (whom I suspect was a former pugilist master). I was half expecting her to channel some “qi” (internal energy) into his system and attack his acupuncture points, but it was all pretty mild. All she did was look very thoughftul and  scribble furiously on her notepad while we explained all his symptoms. After that, she came back with a concoction of 25 herbs and spices in 14 neat little packs. On another note, despite his illness, Tru decided to turn on the charm and spent the whole consult flirting with her, touching her hand and smiling at her. Little Casanova.

Returning home with the meds, we were instructed to feed him the powder twice a day for 7 days. Now how does one feed POWDER to a BABY? The husband had a couple of ingenious ideas.

Husband: Maybe we should add it to his milk.

Me: He’s not stupid. He’ll refuse the milk and after that we’ll have to struggle with feeding him milk.

Husband: I know, we can add it to peanut butter to disguise the taste.

Me: Oh i know, i know- how about putting it into a piece of bread and rolling it up?

Husband: I think we’re just going to have to go primitive.

The first attempt, we tried adding water to it and then feeding him with a syringe, except that we added way too much water and he had ingest 15 full syringes of meds. The whole time, we had to pin him down and force open his mouth while he was screaming and kicking like he was being tortured.

The next round, I wised up and decided to go with a spoon. I also added less water to the mix so it ended up like a HUGE CLUMP OF HERBY PASTE. The screaming and kicking continued and this time, the clump was so huge that he puked it all out and there we were, trying to force back the puke into his mouth. I felt like a Nazi.

We can”t quite post an actual picture, just in case Social Services hauls us down for an interrogation.

I think the whole experience traumatized him so much that for the rest of the day, he was suffering from panic attacks, resulting in random screams throughout a day. And as I found out, crankiness is contagious. The screaming rubbed off on Kirsten and she too decided to join in the fun.

So that’s how my weekend went. Hang on while I push up my specs. I hope I don’t develop a lazy eye from having to see through one eye.