Friday, June 08, 2012

Summertime Woes

Well, today will be the last day of school here and that means from then on till late August, it will be fun and games and many different variations of that too with Maya and Kurt here all day long, every day!

Most likely that will mean a lot of feuds that will have to be intercepted too and that part, I'm definitely not looking forward to them happening. But thankfully, both Kurt's TSS (Miss Dawn) and Maya's TSS, Miss Britt, will both be here and working with the kids to try to keep them relatively stabilized.

One area though where we're going to have to be more than vigilant though is with respect to them being outdoors and getting over-exposure to the sunlight. Maya isn't quite as fair-complected as Kurt is and he, thankfully, isn't as fair as Mandy is -and was -when she was growing up. But Mandy does burn easily, that's for certain and she needs to watch and figure out what are the best skin care brands one can use to avoid getting sunburned!

I'm supposed to avoid excess exposure to the sun now too mainly because of having had chemo -not once, but twice -and apparently that changes something in one's system that makes too much sun more dangerous then.

Unfortunately though for Mandy, it doesn't really matter how much sun she gets, the reaction is almost always the same -in that she burns and blisters over just a little bit of sun.

I remember when she was about 5 years old and happened to have gotten a bit of an over-exposure to sun up at the babysitter's house one day. She came inside and showed the sitter she had some great big blisters already forming on her shoulders and she had no clue what caused that. She told the sitter, as she pointed to these water-filled places, "I'm leaking!"

Needless to say, the sitter and I both got a big chuckle out of her interpretation of things. What was a bit alarming though was that she actually hadn't been out in the sun all that long but just that as light-complected as she is, she freckles really quickly and burns then too.

And, we all know that as much as we love the sunshine, it's really easy to get a bit too much of the good stuff too.

1 comment:

terri said...

I LOVE the sun and am still always tempted to "work on my tan" but knowing the dangers we know now, I try to protect my skin at least somewhat.

They make powerful sunscreens now, but I don't think years ago that they had much. I remember my younger brother blistering too, the way you describe it happening to Mandy.