Thursday, April 29, 2010

Slowly letting go

I have been volunteering at my kids school for years now.  One of the things that we do is parents prepare meals for the students. Today was one of those days.  

First thing this morning I packed up my car with all of the goodies.  We had eggs, bacon, hash browns and fruit.  The smell in my house of  warm bacon was a killer. 

I got to school and hauled all of the food up to the kitchen.  Two other parents met me and we began getting everything cooked. As noon approached, food was flying and everyone had pitched in to ensure that the students had a nice hot meal to eat.  I was in charge of scrambling eggs and rarely came up for breath until all of my mixture was cooked. We had a wonderful system in place and everyone seemed to really enjoy the food they were given. 

After everyone was fed, I sat down for a few minutes to catch a breath before we started on the clean up.  We chatted amongst ourselves and then dug into the washing.  Dishes were piled up but slowly we got through them all. There were very few leftovers and one staff member complimented me on the my ability to get just the right quantity.  I was secretly rather impressed as well! 

Soon everything was back to normal and people returned to their routine.  As I was picking up my stuff and heading towards my car it hit me...I never ran down to Liam's classroom!

I have been helping out with meals for years as I said. When Liam started school I made sure that I was almost always there so that he would have an accurate carb count on his meal. I would tell him how much for the fruit.  I would have looked at all of the ingredients and told him what to bolus for the portion he received.  Today I didn't do that.  Today I left him to count his own carbs. Today he didn't have his mother hovering over him.  Today his mother never entered his classroom to "check" and see if he had the carbs right. Today Mom let go that little bit. Today Mom left him to make his own mistakes or better yet, his own accurate decisions.    

I was proud of me.  Everyone says that I hover too much.  They think that he needs to learn to do more on his own.  Its a slow process. The consequences of errors are too much for me to let go completely but this is a wonderful first step. He is filling out his log book now so soon I will see how close today's calculations really were!  

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