I've joked about adjusting Charlie's happiness levels due to the effect it has on his blood sugar. I'm finding now it's not so funny. The adrenalin that comes from excitement shoots Charlie's blood sugar up like a bottle rocket.
The latest culprit: summer street hockey.
Everything was fine on game day. We were at the pool having fun. Charlie clocked in at a lovely 132 just before I made the mistake of saying, "OK, let's go Charlie. We have to go home and get ready for hockey."
What a horrible dad I am to say such harmful words. In retrospect maybe I should have spoken with the enthusiasm of a corpse …
"You have that thing, Charlie. It's really nothing though."
By then the damage was already done. Charlie couldn't contain himself.
"So we're leaving at 5:30? How many minutes until 5:30? How many seconds? Do you think I'll play forward? Do you think I'll score? Do you think Colin will be there? OK, how many minutes now?"
On the way home, we stopped at a gas station/convenience store and Charlie was attacked by a Turkish man in his mid-60s.
Charlie's pump tubing was sticking out of his bathing suit and he didn't have a shirt on. The owner of the gas station saw Charlie's bony biceps and must have viewed this as a threat because he then ripped off his own shirt and crouched down into Greco-Roman wrestling position; taunting Charlie as his hairy belly jiggled.
"How do you say?" the man asked me, as he now had my son in some sort of deadly Turkish headlock.
"Wrestling," I said.
"Huh?" he said, gaining leverage around Charlie's lightly sunburned neck.
"Wrestling!"
Charlie escaped his grip and the man handed the kids complimentary candy for their troubles. It was basically sugar in paste form and it came in a tube.
"You are never having this," I told Charlie as we left the convenience store.
"What about for lows," he suggested.
"Hmm, good point," I told him. "Let's hang on to it."
Soon after we got home, Charlie sat down for dinner with a blood sugar of 452.
We begged Charlie to settle down with all the hockey talk. Not wanting anything to ruin his chance to play hockey, he became chill. Very chill.
"I'm just going to get my shin guards on, but I don't really care if I play or not," he mumbled devoid of passion, his lips together like a ventriloquist.
By the second period, his blood sugar was 168, he had plenty of insulin active and I've never seen him run harder or faster, ever! I paced the sidelines with an open juice box, squirting small drops of juice through the cage of his hockey helmet like he was the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
Oh, and by the way. He was amazing!
Does this ever end? Is he going to soar up to the 400s or 500s just before his driver's test? Just before the prom? Just before he escapes from prison?
And how am I to predict a random act of Turkish wrestling?
