Finally! A Pain Chart for Parents

No holiday season is complete without a trip to the emergency room, am I right? Parents and people with icy steps and drunk uncles everywhere are unwillingly nodding in agreement.

Today I brought Gutsy to our local children's hospital. We suspected pneumonia (he's had it several times for some unknown reason), but thankfully it just turned out to be a very long, very rotten cold. He's in bed now, and every time he coughs I wince and create worry lines on my beautiful face. Welcome to the premature aging process called motherhood.

Speaking of which, while were waiting for the doctor, I came across a handy-dandy chart of faces in various stages of distress. Gutsy said, "I think it's so little kids can tell them how much pain they're in."

Seemingly valid use, but I call bullshit. I think they stole this thing from a parent support group. The therapist probably gets distraught mothers and fathers to point at it when they're too emotional to use their words - which, in my case, would be often.



See those faces? I have made all of those faces.

0. The face I make when I gaze upon my cooperative little children and forget anything before 10 minutes ago. I'm pretty sure this forgetfulness is a mammalian trait that ensures the survival of our species.

2. This is the face I made every morning for the first 18 months of all my children's lives as I stumbled blurry-eyed to the coffee pot.

4. And this is the face I made when I realized we were out of coffee.

6. Poop in the bath. I am weeping because there is poop in the fucking bath.

8. That's how I looked every time Spawnling bit another kid at playgroup. There's no 9, but the time he hit a friend's kid across the face with a truck and made him bleed all over his mom's white designer sweater? That was a 9.

10. HOLY MOTHER OF AGONY YOU JUST CLAMPED DOWN ON MY NIPPLE.

My only complaint is that there's no 12. Clearly the person who made this has never stepped on Lego.