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Saturday, October 13, 2007 - (see all news for this day)
no more picking his sores - 06:39 PM
(filed under 'smiley')
the other night when smiley came home from nanna & poppy's after being & feeling sick & then falling asleep quite early, he woke up in the middle of the night to ask me, 'mummy. can you make me not sick?' poor little darling.
another question that he asked me was why he was throwing up. i explained as best as i could, in a way that his four year old brain would understand, about good germs & bad germs. i told him that the good germs in his tummy were fighting the bad germs & were telling them to 'get out!'
that night we had a few middle-of-the-night conversations about germs. one of them revolved around his habit of picking his sores.
smiley is a picker & a peeler. i try to avoid him ever getting bitten by mosquitoes, because he'll scratch at it until the skin is grazed & it turns into a sore. he'll then pick at that sore for months & months & months. he's had scabs that he's picked at for about seven months until they've finall scarred & no longer have a scab to pick at. even then, he's picked at the scar until it bled again!
of course i'd tried lots of things to get him to stop, even encouraging him to just rub them rather than pick them. if he had to touch them, then rubbing them gently was surely better than picking the scab off all the time. it was such a habit for him, though, that he even picked his sores in his sleep.
it's been a real issue between us, at times. i didn't want him to end up with heaps of scars all over his body. he recently had a small pimple on his chin which he'd picked at & i was quite worried about him picking that one. scars on the legs are one thing, but i really don't want his face to be full of scars!
so we'd been lying there in the dark talking about the good germs & bad germs & i heard him picking at one of his sores. i told him that if he kept picking at the sores, that he was helping to let the bad germs in. i told him that our skin is one of the main things in our body that helps to keep bad germs out & that the scbas are there to cover the holes. if he kept making holes in his skin then the bad germs can get in too easily. we talked about it for a bit & he asked me various questions, sorting it out in his kid brain.
the next day, he started again to pick at a sore & i reminded him about the bad germs. we talked about using bandaids to help keep the germs out & so we put a bandaid on each sore that he'd been picking at for months on end. for a change, he was happy with that, whereas usually he hates having bandaids on & removes them not long after he's out of my view.
it must have been going around in his mind, because a few minutes later, he walked up to me & told me with much conviction, 'i won't pick my sores anymore, mummy.' he wanted to take the bandaids off. i suggested that maybe it was a good idea to leave them on since they'd be a good reminder that he'd decided not to pick them anymore, but no, he was determined that he wouldn't pick them.
he seems to be keeping to his decision. occasionally he'll start to pick & i might have to remind him, but once i've done so, he leaves it alone. sometimes i see him with his hands down near his legs (where is where he's mostly been bitten by mozzies) & i'll ask if he's picking his sore, but then he says that he's only rubbing it.
i'm quite impressed. when he initially told me that he'd decided to stop picking them, he really did sound as though he'd made a firm decision in his mind. i wondered if he'd stick with it & he has. i'm really pleased. 
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