Respect

Typical, common or garden parents

I’m just recovering from spending a day with our 2 year old godson. We had such a lovely time and as usual, we came home exhausted, covered in unidentifiable bits of half eaten food and with buzzing ears from all the noise.

We don’t have any kids so spending a day with a toddler is quite an experience. You spend the whole time trying to stop them harming themselves in some way – darling, please don’t take a kamikaze leap off the sofa. Do you really prefer eating soil rather than your dinner? Please take your head out of the toilet etc. His mother – who I’ve know since our school days and who won’t mind me saying wasn’t renowned for her athleticism at school – has turned into an Olympic hopeful. She can sprint the length of the living room in 3 seconds flat and has reflexes faster than a champion squash player.

Thankfully our godson doesn’t have diabetes, but I can only imagine how hard it would be if he did.

As it is getting a toddler to eat what you put in front of them or sit still long enough to put his shoes on is a bit of an endeavour. Add to that the challenge of getting the right number of carbs into him and wrestling him to the ground for blood tests and injections and it just becomes too exhausting to think about. It took an amateur like me ten minutes to figure out the godson wanted a drink, how would I cope with trying to work out if he was hypo?

I’ve always thought that being a parent of a diabetic is harder than having diabetes yourself. You have all the usual hassle with even more guess work than normal – is he hypo or just absorbed in Postman Pat, is he high or just tired, did he eat that banana or is it down the back of the sofa? Having spent a full day with a toddler, my admiration for parents of kids with diabetes has grown exponentially. And it was pretty high to begin with. Respect.