Hi All,

Well it just seems our year for "bugs"...strange, you'd think LAST year would have been the one!

Well today was interesting...

CJ was BURNING UP during the night...he's usually the cold one...so I got the thermometer and his temp was up to 102.5!!!

So I fetched him some advil and snuggled through the morning with him.

H called at around 1 p.m. so I grabbed it and chatted with her while I made up some tuna salad to have with chicken soup for lunch.

While on the phone I noticed that CJ had made it back to the couch. It had been about 4 hours since his advil, so I wanted to check his temp again (not too sure how high is too high for an adult).

Well he was groggy, eyes shut and when I asked him to put the thermometer in his mouth, he mumbled a negative response.

Now here I imagine (can't recall exactly) I mimicked his mumble and persisted with the temp reading.

WELL...he threw the thermometer on the floor and told me to quite bugging him...that I had MOCKED him.

I was rather floored by this outburst and got off the phone quickly.

It turned into an argument...he said "you mocked me!"...very upset and angry.

I felt he was just dazed and feverish so I said I'm sorry...but I really did NOT intend to mock him....I was trying to take CARE of him!!!

So I just left him alone, did my own thing, went out for a while (picked up that awesome book I posted about).

We got back into it later on...no resolution...

THEN I got to a place in the book which reminded me of the basic "rules of arguing"...in which the KEY is "I" statements.

BINGO!!

So I went into the living room and asked CJ if I could share something about our argument. He assented.

I said "CJ, I think we both need to work on using more "I" statements when we communicate...this morning had you said: 'When you mimicked the way I mumbled, I felt mocked'...I would have NO recourse but to validate that and apologize.

On the other hand when you said "YOU mocked me"...it put me on immediate defensive, and I felt that my intention (to care for him) was nullified as were my previous caring behaviours.

He agreed.

Communication 101.

Shiny