As you celebrate the fact that your child is now crawling or even walking, you tend to forget that her quest for mobility also comes with some challenges. For instance, this means that your house has to go into a gradual transformation as you move things around, trying to keep them from their tiny, ‘curious’ hands.

But that to me wasn’t the bigger challenge. Mine was controlling what Kwezi puts in her mouth. I had heard of stories but nothing had really prepared me for the day that we, for example, at one time found her not only holding a millipede but busy feasting on it.

There are consequences to everything. When she failed to eat in a few weeks, I blamed teething. Before long, she had a running stomach accompanied with vomiting and a fever. When she vomited the second time and third time and started resting her head on the cushion like someone whose energy was being drained from her body, my first stop was the hospital. Blood was drawn and thankfully, no malaria was detected. Later, her stool determined that she had worms and a peep into her throat also determined that her tonsils were inflamed. She was admitted into the hospital and hooked onto an IV drip. I could have lost my mind at that particular moment. It is difficult to see a child vomiting. It’s new to them so it’s a really painful sight.

One day later, we were home and I had to go back to square one because a child can be sick for two days and they will lose the weight that you have worked on for a good eight months. The point of this story today is to tell you what my doctor told me. You must deworm your child every three months. I was shocked when he told me that after his tests, he had determined that she was getting dehydrated and I almost collapsed when he told me that she would have lost her life if I had stayed home for another hour. He told me that it’s possible for a child to die from dehydration in a matter of three to four hours.

I have picked lessons from our scare of course. I do not think that there is a single day when I do not check Kwezi’s throat to see if her glands are not swollen. I also really stocked up on deworming tablets. My advice, however, is to always take her stool and have the doctor determine what kind of worms you are dealing with.

There are significant changes in what she tries to put in her mouth. For instance, today, no millipedes can be eaten in our home. It is now actually funny how she runs for her dear life at the sight of anything that can even remotely crawl. Kwezi now has fear. And I believe that, that too is growth.