My daughter, the hypochondriac

I know I have seriously been slacking on the blog posts already. Things have been crazy on my end. And I also know that the next post was supposed to be a letter to my 16 year-old-self, but I'm not just prepared to write that one yet, so I'm taking this opportunity to tell you about my daughter's little secret. She's 3, going on 4, so I feel pretty comfortable about "outing her," as she can't read yet. Are you ready?

She's a hypochondriac.

She reminds me of this Shel Silverstein poem called Band Aids. It goes like this:

"I have a Band-Aid on my finger,One on my knee, and one on my nose,
One on my heel, and two on my shoulder,
Three on my elbow, and nine on my toes.
Two on my wrist, and one on my ankle,
One on my chin, and one on my thigh,
Four on my belly, and five on my bottom,
One on my forehead, and one on my eye.
One on my neck, and in case I might need em
I have a box of thirty-five more.
But oh! I do think it's sort of a pity
I don't have a cut or a sore!"

Let's count the ways Katelyn loses her cool about, well, everything. If you ask her if she is sick, she is. She wears slippers around the house because she doesn't want to get a "boo boo" on her feet. She saw a scrape on Jameson's finger and was totally convinced that she would get one too. If she even comes close to falling down outside, she wants to go back in. She saw a girl tonight with a cast on her leg when we went out for pizza, and the whole car ride home she was asking questions about it. "How did the girl break her leg?" "Will she be okay?" "What if I break my leg?" "I don't want to break my leg." "Why did she break her leg?" These questions were interrupted by long periods of silence, but you could still hear her brain ticking away, filling up with worries about this random girl's broken leg. She once thought there was something wrong with her finger because she discovered she could pull her cuticle back from her nail. She then went around asking everyone if their fingers "opened." If she has one of these horrible, debilitating booboos, she will refuse to wash it and will hold both her arms and legs out of the water when she's in the bathtub. Even as I type this she is sitting beside me with a doll that she says is at the doctor because he broke his leg and needs a band-aid.

My daughter is 3 years old and she already needs a placebo.