Here is the culprit.

He stands accused of keeping Amichai from taking his ADHD medicine daily.

And apparently he’s already been tried and convicted.

No one told me raising kids was going to be quite this complicated…or require quite this much detective work.

Let me take you back to the scene of the crime…

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So, Amichai takes medicine to help him (and the rest of us) with his ADHD (emphasis on the H). He takes it three times a day, and there are no nurses in our schools like there are in the schools in the States. No one is handing him his meds or reminding him to take them. So, we bought him this cute little medicine container and he’s been remembering to take it most of the time this year.

Until about 2 weeks ago. And then he stopped cold turkey.

Every day he would come home from school with those little pills still jangling around in their case, and every day I would ask him what happened.

“I don’t know,” he would say.

Wow – thanks Amichai.

But I started noticing that he wasn’t eating all of his food either (and that is definitely NOT like Amichai), and then I got suspicious. So I prodded and poked, asked questions while standing on my head, and danced around every issue I could think of.

Finally, finally, finally, he told me that he doesn’t actually take his lunch bag out of his backpack. He just reaches in each day and grabs whatever he can latch onto to eat. So, he doesn’t see the medicine container calling to him.

“Okkkkkk” I said, trying to figure out what the heck was going on.

“But why do you do that Amichai?”

“Because the kids laugh.”

And my heart just fell out of my chest. These must be some of the hardest words in the history of the language for a parent. “Because the kids laugh.”

Really, who cares what the issue is. When we, as parents, hear those words, we have an immediate need to find human size bubble wrap and to get to work wrapping our kids up forever.

And after many more questions, I got to the bottom of the situation. And then when I still couldn’t possibly believe what Amichai was saying – his older brothers confirmed his story, although this particular thing hadn’t seemed to bother either of them for the last 8+ years.

Apparently, according to these guys at least, Israeli kids don’t have lunch bags. They just toss a sandwich into their bag, throw in some pretzels and add an apple. And they let the whole thing bang around in their bags, and become one with their books.

Don’t ask.

So, Amichai, with his section-dividers and his cold pack and his cute little lunch tote, has been getting laughed at for….well…for having a lunch bag.

You can’t make this stuff up folks.

Now, his lunch bag is bright orange and quite large. So, I decided to do an experiment. The next day I gave him a smaller, dark blue lunch bag like this one.

And BINGO.

No jiggling – no jangling – no pills were left in the bag when he got home from school.

I held my breath. I didn’t really want to get into the hornet’s nest. But I asked Amichai if everything had gone ok at school today and if he had taken his pills.

“Yep, Mommy,” he said, pointing to the new bag. “That was much better.”

Sherlock Holmes is signing off..and hoping today brings another day of small lunch bags with pills that get taken on time.