Please, parent for me. I'd love that.

I get the feeling that we're under scrutiny as parents again. This happens a lot these days, and it kind of sucks. Erin has been coughing for the past few days, and after a while, we got her some allergy medicine just to see if that would help any. Orren has had some allergies lately, and Thak is allergic to pretty much everything on the face of the earth, but more so now than usual, so I figured it was just allergies. She's coughing, but really has no other symptoms. She feels fine. She's not sick.

Yet multiple times this week, the school has told us that she's coughing a lot. Yeah? No shit. Have you seen this place? It's windy season, and sandstorms are a daily occurrence. Who ISN'T coughing a lot? I told them that we got her some allergy medicine, but really, that's about as far as I'm going to go on this. I'm NOT going to turn into that parent who brings my kid to the doctor for every sniffle. It's not going to happen. If she does have something other than allergies (which I doubt) it's probably viral anyhow, and there's nothing that can be done. Our pediatrician does not prescribe antibiotics without very good reason (good reason being a bacterial infection which would actually be knocked back by antibiotics). He does not like to give out drugs any more than we like to pump our kids full of them, so there's no way she's getting on some prescription medication for it. I get the feeling they want a note from him stating that there's nothing more that can be done.

Here's the real kicker. They basically don't want kids leaving school for appointments, and if you absolutely have to, then they want you to schedule it for late in the day, so basically, when the pediatrician's office is so backed up that we'll end up spending 3 hours in the waiting room just to be told that, in fact, we're right and our kid is totally fine, and to just keep doing what we've been doing and ride it out.

I swear, people calling the cops on each other for letting their kids have the tiniest bit of freedom (I'm not the only one that's happened to. I found out it's pretty common.), the schools accusingly saying, "Your kid is coughing a lot." as if we hadn't noticed that, and decided how to deal with that..... What's next? We've never done anything but our best for our kids. We're not perfect parents, far from it, but we try hard and we generally do a pretty good job. They have clothes that fit, they're served mostly pretty healthy food, we bathe them frequently. We read to them, we take them places, we even put them in extracurricular activities when they're old enough. We're not bad parents. I wonder what it will take for people to just take our word for that fact.

Yeah, our kid is coughing. Shockingly enough, we noticed that. Equally shockingly, we're not alarmed. It's a cough, people. It's not like she has a bone sticking through her arm or something. She's allergic to the dust in this desert we live in. We put her on zyrtec. That's enough.