The Case of the Band-aid Bandit

Every two weeks or so, I go through a little ritual.  I go to the store, buy the biggest and cheapest box of Band-aids I can find, and come home and hide it from the Band-aid Bandit.

Sometimes, I think I should just walk in, show her the box, and dump all the Band-aids into the wastebasket.

She needs Band-aids so often, you'd think there was abuse.  Sunday, she whispered to me in church, "Mom, I have a thing on my hand that hurts so much and is driving me crazy."

I admit I was only half-listening, but I tried to shake myself out of it.  After all, how do I know she isn't seriously injured?

"Ooh!  What did you do?" I ask, turning my head to look at her hand, which she is holding up limply, supported fully by her other hand.

"It's that," she whispers, pointing to a place on her skin that looks just fine.  "It keeps catching on stuff and hurting a lot."

I move in for a better look.  "Where is it?"

"There!  It's THAT!"  She is pointing to a healed-over scratch one millimeter long on the top of her hand.

Incredulous, I look at her.  And wait for the punch line.  Here it comes!  HERE IT COMES!

"Can I have a Band-aid?"

To be fair, she doesn't go through the Band-aids all by herself.  Her brother hurts himself up to five times a day. We hear his wail and head for the Band-aid box.  He's always got various body parts he is sticking up from the bathtub lest they get wet and a Band-aid comes off.  It's quite entertaining to watch him try to juggle his washcloth and soap amidst all the sticking up toes, fingers, and other bandaged body parts of the day.

When this boy was learning to say his body parts, he named his forehead his "Bonk."

It's quite a chore trying to keep the Band-aid hiding place a secret as we run to it constantly.  Consequently, we go through them even faster, because it is no secret.  Today, I even told my daughter, after she made her case, to go get a Band-aid, and she didn't even pretend to not know where they were.

Now it seems the ante has been upped to a new level.  Last week, my husband picked up a small supply of postage stamps.

Suddenly, this daughter needed to write letters to all her friends who moved at the end of the school year.  (Because they all moved, you know.)  And great-aunt Eleanor.  And her grandpas for Father's Day.  Dragging her brother along, she took more than one trip to the mailbox.

"Okay, Hon," I said, "But that's it.  Stamps don't grow on trees, like Band-aids."

The next day, I saw another letter hanging out of the mailbox, ready to go.  I looked at it.  It was addressed in red pen to some people I had never heard of.

My daughter's name was on the return address.

"Hon," I said, hauling in my bags from work.  "Who'd you write to today?"

Who else?  Her friend's brother and sister!  "They're friends, too," she said.