"Hey mister!"

"Hey mister!"

On the bus ride to the natural science museum, a kid with a crew-cut and three visible teeth tapped my shoulder. He looked and sounded like he could have wandered off of the set of The Little Rascals. He may as well have been in black and white and wearing dirty overalls.

"Hey mister! Who are you?"

"I’m Charlie’s dad."

"Oh, I know him," the boy said, rubbing his eye with his thumb.

"He’s the one who has …"

It was on the tip of his tongue.

"The one who has …"

I wasn’t about to help him.

The one who has …

A green jacket? A fish named Bob? A cavity in his bottom-left molar? A strikingly handsome father?

"Oh! Diabetes!" he said, enthusiatically, as if getting it just before time ran out.

Congratulations, kid.

I nodded.

I would have preferred to get back to my conversation with Cody, a second-grader whose father got a tattoo of the name Cody in cursive on the inside of his forearm as a birthday gift to his son. I wonder if he got anything else for his birthday other than a tattoo on his dad's arm.

When your child has type 1 diabetes, you often become an automatic chaperone for field trips. Which is great because caring for Charlie while he is having a record-breaking number of false-alarm low blood sugars isn't really enough of a challenge. To make it a little more interesting, I needed to also be responsible for three other rambunctious 8-year-old boys in a busy museum in Philadelphia.

Spanky tapped my shoulder again.

"I lived in Philadelphia. It's a disgusting place."

Charlie set a strong pace early, telling me he felt low three times during the bus ride. Two blood sugars in the low 30s the day before forced me to take each and every claim (and there were many) as gospel.

Under the shadow of the bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex: "I feel low."

Standing over a 2,500-year-old mummified Egyptian man: "I feel low."

Looking into a diorama of wild yak: "I feel low."

In an 80-degree misty temperature-controlled tropical garden with hundreds of butterflies flying around our heads: "I feel low."

To their credit, the three other boys were really good about stopping all day for sugar-checking pit stops.

During a blood sugar check on the bus ride home, Spanky leaned over and watched.

"Are you putting holes in his fingers?" he asked.

I wiped the blood from Charlie’s finger with an alcohol swab and shook my head.

"Nope. You’re not low."

I am putting holes in his fingers and I have been for almost seven years. I don’t want to anymore. I’m tired of putting holes in my son's fingers.

Tomorrow, my robot son gets new parts. Charlie gets attached to a continuous glucose monitor. His sensors are packed and ready to go, his transmitter is being charged as I type this and his chest-mounted laser beams are being tightened.

I’m excited and ready to take this next big step.

I hope Charlie likes it. If not, I guess we can return it.

Maybe get him a tattoo on my arm instead.