Guilty conscience

When Ella got home from school today, she seemed a little bit off and I could tell that she wasn't 100% happy about something, but she said she was fine and had a good day.  Alyssa and Chaka were both here, so I couldn't immediately get to the bottom of it, but I figured I'd talk to Ella once I was done working.

In a completely unprecedented event, she fell asleep on the couch around 4:10 pm. I woke her up at 4:30 to see if she was feeling sick or what was wrong. She was hard to wake up, and said she didn't feel good, but couldn't say what was wrong (wasn't her throat, wasn't her stomach, she didn't have a fever).

It was our night to bring the snack for her Daisy troop meeting, so I said let's go pick up snack at the store and if she didn't feel up to the meeting, we'd just drop snack off and come back home. I was thinking that she'd want to go to Daisies, especially after picking up all the ingredients for strawberry shortcakes, but she still seemed to feel very unwell and we just dropped snack off at the girl scout house before the meeting started.

We came home and I got her showered and while dinner was cooking (which I figured she'd be too sick to eat), we were sitting in the playroom talking. All of a sudden she said to me "When you were little did you ever get in trouble on the bus?" ... I asked her if she got in trouble on the bus today, and then it all came out. She had talked back to her bus driver in the afternoon (he is incredibly sweet, super nice guy, Ella sits right behind him and really likes talking to him), and was feeling so guilty about it.

We talked about what she could've done instead, and what she can do next time to make sure it doesn't happen again. While we talked, it was like she had a miraculous recovery - she became chatty and talkative and I could see her starting to feel better.

It was quite a thing to observe, and by the time I put her to bed tonight, she was completely back to her normal happy self. It could be a complete coincidence but seems to be a case of a heavy conscience taking a physical toll. Yikes!