Bee is for Birthday

Tomorrow will be my wife’s birthday, but we celebrated it this weekend.

My son loves birthdays, and has been thinking of Mom’s for quite a while now. On Saturday morning, while we were driving from his ice skating class to his karate class, Kai asked me to stop at Walgreen’s so he could get Mom her birthday present. He knew just what he wanted to get.

We went in the store and he dashed to the cosmetics section. There is a brand of lipgloss called Wetslicks Fruit Spritzers that comes in many different flavors/colors. My son loves colors, but the real attraction for this particular product is that each flavor has a different number on the package. For Mother’s Day, he got 525 Tangerine, and 530 Watermelon. For the past five months, he has been thinking about what different numbers he would get for Mom’s birthday. He decided on 520 Papaya and 535 Raspberry, and also picked out a Peanuts birthday card for her.

On Sunday morning, while my wife was out working, Kai and I prepared for the birthday dinner we would have that evening. We started out with the birthday cake. Last year I tried to bake one but this time I took the easy way out and picked up a gluten-free, dairy-free cake from Whole Foods. All we had to do was to add the frosting and decorate it. Kai used decorating “pens” to write “Happy Birthday Mom.” We also wrapped his lip gloss presents and started preparations for the dinner.

In the afternoon, after my wife came home, he wanted to play ten different sports together with me and Mom. We had all ten picked out and started with football, before proceeding to baseball (or, at least, his Kai Ball version of baseball), then basketball, hockey, and golf. It was a beautiful day out and perfect for playing all these sports.

But, we never got past sport number five.

As we were cleaning up the golf equipment, we suddenly heard Kai scream, “A bee!” When we turned to look at him, he was clutching his finger and screaming, “I NEED A BAND-AID!” We did not see a bee, and I managed to unclutch his hand long enough to see that there was no stinger in his hand. He did not appear to be having any type of allergic reaction.

Still, the screaming was relentless. We took him inside. While I went on the internet to google “bee sting,” Kai was in panic mode as he emptied the contents of the medicine cabinet looking for a box of band aids. While my wife attempted to calm him, I discovered that as long as there is no allergic reaction, there is nothing to do except use ice to reduce the swelling.

I returned to the terrorized one and tried to gently put ice on his finger. In the midst of all his blood curdling screams, my wife asked him, “Are you sure it was a bee?” This boy, who usually takes forever to answer any of our questions, immediately replied, “YES, I’M SURE!”

The screaming continued. “I NEED TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL RIGHT NOW! I NEED TO GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM!” We told him that he would be all right and that there was no need to go to the emergency room.

With tears in his eyes, he looked up at me and said, “Dad, I’m not going to see you anymore” as if he was about to depart for the hereafter.

The whole episode lasted for several minutes, though I’m sure it seemed much longer to Kai. When he finally started to calm down, I said, “If the pain was 100% at its worst, how much is it now?” He replied that it was 70%. A little while later it was 50%. Before too long, it went down some more. After that, worn out by his bee trauma, he took a rare afternoon nap.

When he awoke, I made dinner and we had our birthday celebration. We ate dinner, Kai and I sang the “Happy Birthday” song, and Mom opened her presents. Mom liked the lip gloss and birthday card that Kai picked out. We all liked the cake from Whole Foods.

But, best of all, my wife and I both loved that Kai was so enthusiastic about celebrating Mom’s birthday and did so much to make it fun.

Now, that’s really worth screaming about!

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