**Terrible news

On a cool, crisp day in November while feeling great with myself for crossing something off my "to do" list, I was hit with news that I had no idea would affect me so much.

Prior to getting poked with a flu shot, with my 5 year old sitting on my lap trembling, I was told by the wonderfully gentle public health nurse - who also works at our pediatrician's office - that our spectacularly competent, confident, beautifully kind, caring pediatrician is getting married and moving away. The practice is being given to another physician.

Dr. K. has been a savior to us. In my profession, I have had the displeasure of working with countless arrogant, ill-informed, narcissistic, incompetent doctors, and I have always felt so incredibly lucky to have a doctor for myself and hubby that I trust, and even more importantly, the most wonderfully thorough and shockingly current doctor for my children.

When my son was 2 1/2 he got what could have been a life-threatening infection in his knee joint. Dr. K. worked so quickly and efficiently, knew precisely what to do, and acted on the matter so quickly that we prevented the spread of the infection to the bone and my boy was home and running around again in 3 days.

Over the next few months, while the frequent check-ups were draining for us, my little man and his doctor who saved him, developed a wonderful relationship. He had been scared of the doctor, as many kids are, with the needles and sickness and stress that he surely felt coming from the adults, but by the time he was deemed cured, him and Dr. K had the utmost admiration for one another. She'd take him in the stairwell of the building to see him walking the stairs to make sure his knee was healing okay, and he thought it was a game, they would play "Simon says" and have him jump up and down. Most importantly however, she followed up so vigilantly and got us the care we needed within hours of symptoms occurring, and she prevented permanent damage to his knee, or even worse possible outcomes.

She seems to be light-years ahead of many other doctors in every-day illnesses as well. When my daughter got strep throat, she called us in the midst of her antibiotic treatment to switch to a different antibiotic because some kids in her practice were having relapses after using this particular drug with this particular infection. She prevented a recurrence by being proactive. Two months later on the evening news, they reported on the findings that strep infections in children weren't responding to conventional antibiotics as they had in the past.

We don't visit her often, but when we do, it is because we need her. It is so priceless - especially with how much I know, which is sometimes more of a curse than a blessing - to have that safety net there for your children. To know that if that day comes (which hopefully never will) when you need someone to help your child, she will be there, and she will absolutely do the right thing. Without that, to me, parenting seems more difficult. I tense up when I think that my safety net will be in Owen Sound. And as she passes the torch to another doctor I well-up inside. I hope it never happens again that we need her skill and precision, but if it did and she wasn't there, I cringe at the thought of what could happen...what could have happened to my boy had Dr. K. not been there.

**The good ol' days

I'm trying to figure out how my life has become so busy. In the last couple of months my family has gone from trying to find things to do to keep busy, to trying to find time to take a shower because that 10 minutes is difficult to schedule in a day. What changed? Our calendar used to have a couple of appointments/activities/playdates, but now we're running out of room on most of those impossibly tiny squares.

I'm not really sure that I'm complaining because afterall, I am a person who thrives on being busy, and it is very nice to be surrounded by such a large volume of happy plans, but my views have shifted. I used to look at a blank calendar day and think "oh great...what the heck are we going to do? Will it be warm enough to go to the park? Do I have energy to venture to the Science Centre? Maybe it will be a walk around the mall and looking at the toy department at Zellers"... And now I see a blank day...well, that's a lie, there really aren't any, but if I DID stumble upon one, I would smile. A day to just *BE*.

Between kindergarten, swimming lessons, gymnastics classes, playdates, appointments, meetings, working and cooking (well, ordering), it's hard to find time to breathe. I can't even imagine what it will be like when the kids are in separate extracurricular activity classes, have separate friends and make separate plans. We will need an industrial-sized calendar.

Hubby commented that while trick-or-treating this year he realized that a year or two ago he spent countless hours walking around the neighbourhood, pushing a stroller and encouraging a toddler to walk. Now the area is foreign again as a walk around the neighbourhood would have to be scheduled a month in advance!

Some days I feel proud to provide my children with such a rich, full life filled with friends, family and fun, but some days I see how it is good too to have hours and hours to just let them play with toys, make up games, read some books, colour some pictures, and just make their own entertainment - the kind that doesn't need to be written in a calendar.