When you are ill, it's nice to make your sickroom into a restful haven. Or you can put a giant tiger at the foot of the bed.
Please excuse my radio silence for the past week: I have been dwelling in a land of pestilence. May Blossom came down with a nasty virus that made her cough and run a fever and gave her the disposition of a scorpion. A clingy scorpion who couldn’t be separated from her mother AT ALL without dissolving into tears.
As usual, the scorpion business began before there were any definite symptoms of illness, and as usual H and I immediately assumed not that she was getting sick, but that our run of luck parenting a delightful, funny, amiable and pleasant child had screeched to a halt and May Blossom had morphed permanently into a monster. We always do this. It’s like the parenting equivalent of how PMS gives me PMS amnesia, and I can’t for the life of me work out why life is suddenly so hard and why everyone I know is such an arsehole and … oh. Oh yeah. That again.
So there we were with a kid who wouldn’t sleep and wouldn’t eat and cried all the time and couldn’t be put down. And instead of remembering the five or six other times that had happened, and how the next day we would all wake up and May Blossom would have spots and no balance and quite clearly be sick, we descended into the three am despair of parents who are convinced that this was going to be our lot FOREVER.
The next day, we woke up and May Blossom had spots and no balance. She was coughing and her temperature was up. Oh yeah. That again. On the doctor’s advice we gave her a couple of days to kick the lurgy before we went down Antibiotic Avenue again, but three days later she was worse. So drugs it was. I’m awfully glad we did, because as soon as we started her on them she quickly began to improve.
As she came back up, I went down. And oh my stars that was one nasty virus, and it left me with a sinus and a chest infection. I haven’t been that sick in a really, really long time. Luckily the worst of it (I hope) was over the weekend so H could step in and do all the parenting. I took to my bed and rested, pausing only to eat soup, watch old British sitcoms and complain about the quality of the tissues. I am a delight to nurse.
May Blossom and H stayed out of the house as much as they could, but whenever they were home MB would bring little gifts to my bedside. They were almost always blocks, but I did also get several shredded tissues, a ball and a five-foot-tall stuffed tiger. I am a lucky woman. She delighted in mimicking the beeps of the thermometer and was extremely jealous of my nasal spray (let’s face it, who isn’t?).
I hope to get back to my regular schedule of blogging soon, but it might be a few more days between posts for a while. And on that note, any requests? Anything you want to know about my life? At the request of reader Aly, I am working on a few tales from the end of my pregnancy, as she reaches the end of hers. Although I’ll be hard-pressed to do better on the nesting front: apparently she moved the fridge a few days ago. I plan to post another recipe soon, too, when I cook something that isn’t made of bread, butter and Vegemite.
Until then, stay well, readers. Don’t touch anything I’ve touched, or a plague will be upon your house.
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