"Mom, I've been peeing a lot today. Prolly five times since we got home," No. 1 says to me as I'm lying on the bed counting the seconds until the kids go to bed. Yes, it's been a stressful, well, five days, and I can't wait to go back to work. But I digress.

No. 1 has been "complaining" quite a bit lately about his need to frequently see a man about a horse. He doesn't know that those comments make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. My head goes right to worst-case scenario, although reality does tell me that he has no obvious symptoms on the diabetes checklist.

Sure, he's going potty more often than he thinks he should, but he's not drinking obsessively, he's not overly tired (usually beats me out of bed in the morning, in fact), doesn't have an insatiable hunger, nada.

I try to tell myself that he's 8 years old and that 8-year-old boys require a lot of fluids to replenish all that spent energy (and my God is it a lot!), but what do I tell him instead? Like a knee-jerk reaction: Well, we need to check your blood sugar.

Fear sets in quickly behind his eyes. My son, who is obsessed with everything military--the definition of macho--has a gigantic fear of needles. I mean gigantic. Not long ago he had a pretty sizable splinter in one of his fingers. I came at him with about the smallest safety pin in the world and you'd have thought I was threatening to gauge his eyes out.

So tonight when he says, "Mom I'm peeing a lot," I tell him we need to check his blood sugar. "Why?" he desperately wants to know. It's so hard for me to get into the semantics with him, so I tell him it's just to make sure his blood sugar is OK. I don't want him to make the connection, though, between blood sugar and frequent potty breaks.

"C'mon," I say, "I need to check mine, too." I had hoped that him watching me (again) would slightly ease his fear. But no, even with me nearly holding him down like a contortionist, he wouldn't sit still long enough for me to poke his finger. All the explaining in the world didn't work either.

My sugar, by the way, was 68, which explains perfectly why I got so angry at his resistance. (One of my low/lowish symptoms is unexplained irritation.) No. 2, who has previously been quite a willing guinea pig, refused to let me check her sugar, as well.

Reality tells me he's fine, but the obsessive diabetic mother in me wants to be sure. I'm not worried about convincing him to let me check, though: I know where he sleeps.