The mosquito almost got away with it.

Fast forward a couple days from our last post. The itching had calmed down, but two of the bites had developed little blisters with pink rings around them, and that’s the part that made me stop scrolling and start paying attention.

Here’s the thing about our family: we react to bug bites like we’re trying to medal in something. Jacob does it. Justin does it. I do it with fire ants, and fire ants and I have a relationship built entirely on mutual hatred. So I wasn’t terrified. I was cautiously suspicious, which is a very specific flavor of mom paranoia that looks like nothing from the outside and is actually a full background investigation.

Which is how I ended up giving Harper a manicure while secretly keeping one eye on her mosquito bites the whole time.

She was busy admiring her freshly painted nails and narrating Very Important Three Year Old Business when I quietly grabbed a marker and drew a tiny circle around each bite. Nothing dramatic, just a little outline so I’d know if the redness started creeping past the border. Simple. Scientific. Responsible parenting, if you squint.

She looked down at her leg and immediately clocked what I’d done.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh,” I said, very casually, “I’m just marking your bug bites so I can keep an eye on them.”

She did not miss a beat.

“That’s inappropriate.”

I froze. I’m sorry, what?

“You don’t draw on your legs,” she informed me. “Especially bug bites.”

Now, you have to understand something about Harper: she hates being laughed at. Not in a dramatic way, she just wants to be taken seriously, always, about everything, including apparently the ethics of dermatological Sharpie use. So when she says something that makes every muscle in your face beg to smile, you have to summon the emotional control of a Navy SEAL and hold the line.

I held the line. Barely.

“Well, sometimes moms mark bug bites so they can see if they change,” I said.

She sighed. The sigh. The one usually reserved for people who need taxes explained to them while they’re still eating crayons.

“They’re bug bites. This is what they do. They’ll be here forever.” She thought about it for another second, clearly circling back to close the argument. “These are just bug bites. If your mom is weird, she draws on them, which is not appropriate.”

At this point I am fighting for my life not to laugh in this child’s face.

“But…”

She shrugged, done with me. “My mom is just really, really weird.”

Case closed, apparently, by a three year old with wet nail polish.

Somewhere in the Parenting Handbook there’s a chapter titled Things Weird Moms Do, wedged right between Cut Sandwiches Into Dinosaur Shapes and Smell Shirts to Decide if They’re Clean Enough. I’ve officially made the list.

The irony is that in twenty years she won’t remember the mosquito bites. She won’t remember the hydrocortisone cream, or that I was quietly watching those blisters because I wanted to make sure they weren’t turning into something worse. What she’ll remember is that her mother attacked her legs with a Sharpie and called it medical care.

Honestly, that’s the better story anyway.

I just hope when she tells it, she at least mentions that I let her pick the nail polish first.