A social balancing act.

Yesterday, I went to Sydney, over three hours from home to meet some of my favourite Australian bloggers. It was the first time I had ever done something like it.

There were five Mums and lots of kids (mine made up the lagest…portion).

It was great.

Everyone had a wonderful time,  including Ivy, who is in the thick of meltdown week and Mal, who usually reverts to spinning wheels and other autistic behaviours, when he is thrust into a social setting that he is unfamiliar with.

The thing is that one of the blogging friends didn’t come.

She didn’t come because one of her children was unwell with a cold and she did not want to “risk making Ivy unwell”.

While I love her for it, love the consideration that this mum showed for my little girl, I also feel incredibly sad that our situation prevented this Mum from coming.

It is like that everywhere – friends and family have become extra vigilant when coming to visit and of course I have become hypersensitive to every cough and cold and illness that every kid in the universe is carrying around. In the shops, at preschool, if my own children get the sniffles, I feel my hackles rising at the impending infection risk.

I guess I have made a rod for my own back. I have taken Ivy out of social situations because another person is sick and I have asked that others stay away if there are any lurgies lurking in their bodies.

Now that she has the IVIG though, I have been wiling to jump in there and take a chance that this medicine will do what it’s supposed to do and help Ivy fight off alot of the nasties. We go to the shopping centre (okay, I still largely carry her and encourage her not to touch the common germ collectors – trolleys (our worst nightmare), railings, floors, walls –  and other places where lots of people congregate, she’s started preschool – a rampant pool of bacteria, viruses and fungii

and we have started to go out socially again, even when our friends are sick.

Still, the majority of people are wary of their babies making my baby sick and this has placed us in a weird social position.

I know I have done this – caused a certain kind of isolation

but I want Ivy to live as normal a life as possible now that she is eight months into the Intragam.

I need the social interaction too

but I understand and appreciate how people don’t want to be responsible for Ivy enduring another hospitalisation, another horrible illness

and I don’t want to expose Ivy to it either.

It’s a catch 22, a damned if you do and a damned if you don’t (can I write that here?) kind of situation.

I don’t want to stop people coming out with large groups of people though. I certainly don’t want Ivy to be the reason that somebody chooses not to bring their child out to a party or a gathering where they or their children would benefit.

It is a social balancing act.

 

 

 

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