At a recent family get-together, I gave a subtle "psssssst" to my mother and pointed over to the kitchen where Charlie was hunched over, lining up the pricker against his pinky. She had never seen him test himself.

She watched with a tear in her eye.

This brings up something I've been wondering about. Now that Charlie has decided to start testing himself, does that mean we just hand the responsibility over to him full bore? He is only 7. When is the right age to relinquish a task like this to a child? Different for everyone, I imagine. We have basically continued to test his blood sugar throughout the day and Charlie takes one or two if he's up to it.

I suppose the gradual approach is the right way to go about it with Charlie as he made it perfectly clear recently that he wasn't ready to prick his fingers on a full-time basis.

"I've been testing myself all day," he explained to Susanne, exasperated.

"Can you do it?"

Endo appointment tomorrow. It’s been sort of a rough summer of high blood sugars and I’m not looking forward to it. As in past visits, I won’t be feeling the need to sneak into Charlie’s chart and tear through the papers to find his latest A1c.

I was never much of a math student. As punishment for my high school failures, in my first year of college, I was forced to take some sort of second-grade level, non-credit math course with a room full of other geniuses. I think we learned shapes.

I remember sitting in math class in high school when exams were being returned. I remember being envious of others who had "Great Job!" and "Well Dones!" written in red ink with several underlines to stress the achievement.

I remember waiting miserably for my "See Me," thinking that there is no way this is going to be good.