Rylee missed her first day of school already. Seeing as the kids’ first week of school was only four days long that means that Rylee hasn’t even completed a full week of grade three yet. She’s back today, thankfully.

Rylee is not one to miss school when she’s feeling ill; it takes a lot to knock her on her buttocks and keep her there. Actually, that’s true for both of my offspring although it would be for two very different reasons. Rylee, at her age, sees the fun that could and will happen around her for that day. Kristen sees the potential backlog of homework that she’d have to catch up on if she were to miss a day of school. I’m not saying that Kristen isn’t fun. It’s just that she sees a realistic view of what could happen. On the other side of the coin, I’m not saying that Rylee’s always stuck in a dream land of cotton candy clouds and elixirs of unicorn giggles. That’s only when she’s awake!

She came down with a slight case of puking on her bedspread the night before, and seeing as she had eaten dinner at her new friend’s house we just chalked it up to unfamiliar food. Michelle had to inform the mother of this new friend that Rylee may put on the front of being a vegetarian. She has done this before and gotten away with, if I remember correctly, eating a dinner of corn on the cob, mashed potatoes and ice cream. As a child, I probably would have mixed them all together let alone enjoyed them immensely.

Well, we cleaned Rylee up not before I stepped bare footed into a small wet spot on the floor. Oddly enough, the tine pile of vomit contained corn. We cleaned her up, as I was saying, and she went to sleep. She got up before me the next morning and seemed in good spirits but had a temperature, so Michelle kept her home for the day.

Later on, Rylee admitted to Michelle that she had swallowed a loonie. I remember a time I had put a coin in my mouth and accidentally swallowed it, but I don’t remember specifics. I can’t recall any pains about loosing the money, so obviously I was too young to appreciate the value of it. Or it was when we lived in the Philippines which meant it was a Peso, and I knew it wasn’t worth much anyways. Either way, I swallowed a coin. I do not remember what happened next or if it was ever recovered.

Last night when I was putting Rylee to bed we had a little talk about the cleanliness of coins. I told her that if, at minimum, the loonie she had swallowed were handled by a thousand hands prior to coming into her possession, there was a thousand hands worth of nose picking, bum wiping, crotch scratching bacteria running around on the coin’s surface. I know that this isn’t exactly true, but with Rylee you have to make the picture bigger and brighter to get your message across. She still picks her nose and pops the nuggets into her mouth from time to time, for crying out loud. Mmmm!

Rylee informed me that she had, ahem, passed the loonie into the toilet, but wisely did the math and came to the conclusion that the economic benefit of fetching the coin did not out weigh the disgusting process of actually retrieving it from its gross encasing. For that I am very proud of her!