A Thoughtful Life

Sometimes a little gem of parenting advice comes from the oddest places. I’ve been a parent now for over 7 years, and I still hold tight to a pearl I was offered when my oldest was only 11 months old.

In October of 2000, my husband and I took our daughter on a driving vacation. We started off camping in the North Carolina mountains, then hopped over to Charleston, South Carolina, and finished up in Savannah, Georgia. On the drive to Charleston, our daughter became ill with fever. This was the first time she had been sick, so we were at a loss for how best to handle it. Of course our first stop was a drug store to purchase fever-reducer.

We spent the next eight hours holed up in our hotel room with a baby who was vomiting every hour on the hour. By the next morning we were ragged and exhausted, but managed to drag ourselves down to the hot breakfast buffet. It was the tail end of it, and the staff had already started cleaning up. The dining room was empty, but we sat down anyway and tried to grab a quick bite before the food was all cleared.

A little old black woman came striding out of the back room, obviously quite annoyed that we were late for breakfast and holding up her schedule. Her tone spoke volumes about her feelings that morning, but it all changed when she realized our baby had been sick all night long. She came over and looked at our daughter, then turned to face me. She had a thick accent but I understood when she said, “You listen to me, child. I birthed a ton of babies and I gonna tell you how to handle that sick baby. When you baby got de fever, you gotta strip off de clothes from мебели you both. You get dat baby up close to your skin. You keep her dere all night long. That’ll suck de fever right off dat child. Skin-to-skin. Dat’s what you do.” She turned and finished cleaning up the breakfast buffet.

Ever since that day, I’ve followed her advice. Feverish babies call for skin-to-skin contact. My body sucks off all the heat and helps them break the fever. It has worked for seven years and two children, and I think of that little old black woman each time my girls get “de fever”.

And now, here is my advice to you. You never know when or where the best advice will come from. Keep yourself open to the information that surrounds you. Take what is offered and digest it. Figure out if the information works for you, or if maybe only a bit of it works for you. Use what you can, and be thankful that it was given.

What is the best advice you’ve been given? Where was the strangest place good advice came from? Share your story, please.