When my oldest was four or five, she had a doctor’s appointment that had been described to me by the receptionist as a checkup involving no vaccines.  When we parked the van in front of the office, my daughter began crying, remembering the last time she had gotten a shot.  I promised her that she would not be receiving a needle that day and she could come in for her check up without worrying about a needle, as I would not ever lie to her.  She trusted me enough to come into the office for her appointment, so I was devastated when the nurse began preparing her for a vaccine.  I explained what I had been told and based my promise of no needle to my daughter on the information I received from the receptionist.  The nurse just shrugged and said, “It’s just one shot and will only take a minute.”  I felt the anger register on my face as I told the nurse she would be wasting a needle if she unwrapped the one she was holding as I was going to have to schedule another appointment for the purpose of the vaccine.  She continued to open the needle as she explained how ridiculous she felt I was behaving, as though her opinion had been solicited.  When my daughter’s examination was finished, without the vaccine, and we returned to the waiting area, the nurse and reception staff lowered their voices as we passed, obviously caught in the act of agreeing with one another about how “ridiculous” keeping the promise to my daughter had been.  The subsequent appointment was scheduled for the following morning, causing me to miss another day from work, but I never regretted a moment of it, knowing I had earned my daughter’s confidence.  My daughter is now 16 and I am sure I have been ridiculous several times since that day, but I am proud to say that she trusts me, ridiculous or not.

It was around that time that we took the girls to the zoo for a day of stressful entertainment.  We had made it past the smelly pigs and a souvenir shop, the smelly caribou and a souvenir shop, the smelly moose and a souvenir shop, and the smelly elk and a souvenir shop, when my husband said, “Before we reach the next smelly souvenir shop, I gotta take a leak.”  We waited on the bench near the rest rooms for my husband while I noticed several other men entering the men’s room and coming out almost immediately, some of them actually running.  I couldn’t imagine what was going on to make these men behave this way as my own husband hadn’t come right back out after disappearing behind the door.  When he did return to us, he was laughing and explained that there was a peacock inside the men’s room admiring himself in the mirror and apparently liked his privacy as he was chasing out anyone easily frightened.   I asked him why he wasn’t afraid of it, to which he replied, “Well, he was a little intimidating, but I needed the bathroom more than he did, and I obviously had to go worse than those other guys.  When you gotta go, you gotta go.”  From there, we went to the petting zoo and while I got out the money to buy some crackers to feed the goats, I could feel my daughter’s hand reaching into my pocket as she often did when I couldn’t hold her hand while I was going through my bag.  It took longer in line than expected, so I wasn’t surprised when my husband took the girls over to one of the cages to see the monkeys while waiting for me.  What did surprise me was that while I was watching my older daughter running around my husband and her sister, I still felt her hand in my pocket.