Katyboo1’s Weblog

My forty eight hour window of normality is now officially closed.  Oscar screamed the place down at eight o’clock last night and when I went up to see him he had a lovely, lovely fever which I nursed till about three o’clock this morning.  I spent the rest of the night sleeping in a heap of blankets on his bedroom floor in case he overheated.  I woke up feeling like Grandma Clampett, aching in every bone.  I have creaked about everywhere, surgically welded to a hot water bottle ever since.  I have avoided the Ralgex on the grounds that it still doesn’t seem to be showing a sell by date, and I really ought to throw it away and buy a new one, rather than just peering hopefully into the cupboard for a medical miracle.

You really think I’d have grown out of that by now.  That whole, if I hope hard enough things will be radically different when I look again.  If I think about Slim Fast long enough I will have shed half a stone between the pantry and the scales.  If I stare long enough at those Christian Louboutin’s I will get home to find them magically resting in my shoe cupboard.  Hope springs eternal.

I thought all the aching was just because I had spent all night kipping on the floor and my weary old bones just aren’t used to that kind of Bohemian lifestyle any more.  Turns out that’s probably true but I seem to have caught Jason’s cold as well.  It feels like someone has flayed my skin with a potato peeler and my head is as heavy as lead.  Jason is now at the stage of recovery where when I exhibit a new symptom he nods knowingly and points out that he had it first and his was much worse than mine.  I am being kind to him by not karate chopping him in the windpipe.  It has nothing to do with the fact that I can’t even brush my hair without wincing.

I don’t mind getting it now, because there is a good chance I will be on the road to recovery by Saturday which is when Andrea is taking me to see Ian McKellen in King Lear and we are going up to the big smoke for the day.  I cannot miss this for the world.  I have been looking forward to it for months now.  Every time I misbehave Andrea threatens to sell my ticket on Ebay, where they are exchanging hands for vast sums of money, and I have managed to be good up to now.  The effort has nearly killed me mind you.

I did think that we might enter two thousand and eight in a more healthy mood, possibly even progressing from alright to wet glossy noses, sparkly coats and dewy eyes.  I had been thinking of entering the children for some kind of ‘cute kids of the year’ award, or possibly Crufts.  It seems unlikely that this will now transpire, as Oscar has Anthea Turner eyebrows, where snot has welded them into an interestingly stiff pattern, and he has a frighteningly spotty face from all the dribble, snot and sweat.

Our path is destined to be a sticky one through the beginning of 2008.  Our vitality meter is now at zero and falling, and Oscar has been quick to point out his woes today on multiple occasions.  It is, I am led to believe, all my fault, and if I would only give him everything he wants, even though he doesn’t know what it is, and if I would only work out what it is that he wants for him, all would be well.  It’s a Gordian knot type affair, but with more mucous than in the original story. 

Apparently there are only two acceptable modes of being at the moment, one is clamped to my bosom with his snotty nose buried in my neck.  The other is in the bath playing with a green plastic watering can.  I know the watering can is important because he screams if anyone tries to take it off him.  He can only be persuaded to relinquish it if he is given a small and extremely nasty model of Makka Pakka (who looks like a cross between a Danish pastry and a pooh, and who I keep calling Packa Mac, much to the kids disgust) in exchange. 

Now for those of you who don’t know, Makka Pakka is a figure from the increasingly bizarre pantheon of children’s televisual viewing that CBeebies offers up.  The programme is called; ’In the Night Garden’.  As ever, I go there so that you don’t have to.  If you are at University, permanently stoned and living on cereal and beer, you might like it.  Otherwise it is to be avoided at all costs.  My friend who also has small children claims to like it.  I think she’s in denial, or possibly on drugs.  It makes Teletubbies look like a serious documentary exposing the privations of life in 21st Century Britain.  Nevertheless, he likes it, and it is a dry land substitute for the can, so we cut our cloth accordingly.

Now I prefer the watering can option, but there are only so many baths a boy can take during one day without turning into something which resembles a giant, living brain.  He is after all a boy and not a dolphin, although he would no doubt beg to differ.  Today ‘differing’ has been one of his top specialities.  The amount of time he has been forced to spend on land by his hideously unsympathetic mother meant that we have been glutinously welded together for large parts of our waking time.  I have had to change my t-shirt twice today due to interesting snot trails which I didn’t really want to have to turn into a feature.  As he flatly refused to have a nap either, this means that we have bonded closely for about twelve hours.  Nice.

Tallulah asked me a while ago when we were heading to school in some kind of pre-winter Arctic blizzard, why I didn’t wear nice dresses and what she calls ‘clip cloppy’ shoes like the other mummies do.  I gave her a Paddington Bear hard stare and asked if all the other mummies had to spend all night chiselling snot off the face of a screaming infant and then, after only three or four hours sleep, leap into action to dress, wash and feed two other reluctant children? 

I pointed out that I didn’t think that other mummies generally had to have an audience of three whenever they were performing ritual ablutions/going to the toilet, nor did they usually only have about five minutes in which to wash, dress and comb their hair.  This probably meant that they had time to do other things, like struggling into a ball gown to go to school. 

Nor did they have to put up with questions like: ‘When am I going to have enormous boobs like yours mama?’ or, ‘Why does your tummy fold up like that mama?’ or, ‘Because you have a spot on your face, does that mean you are dirty, mama?’  I could be wrong about this, but it sufficiently made my point for her to change subject.  The next topic for discussion turned out to be: ‘What does it feel like to be five, mama?’ and, ‘If I don’t like being five, can I just skip to being six please mama?’

On a more cheerful note, the children came back from Jamie’s today in a good mood, which was only enhanced when they discovered that they are back to school tomorrow.  It is terrific that they love school so much.  I feel that in this department I am well and truly blessed.  I used to loathe school with every fibre of my being, and did everything in my power to avoid going.  Consequently the last day of any holiday was a sombre, hideous affair which mostly involved me trying to make myself ill enough not to have to go back to school the next day. 

Someone once told me that if you ate toothpaste it would give you a high temperature.  This may be true, but as ever, pushing the boundaries of experimentation, I am here to tell you that you have to eat so much for this to happen that you are invariably wretchedly sick before you get to such a point.  You are also refused the luxury of a day off school when your mother finds that your vomit is unusually minty fresh, and quite stripey.  Well and truly busted.

I only started to enjoy school once I reached sixth form.  This was mainly to do with having free periods where my friends and I could lope off into town and eat the local greasy spoon out of tea cakes for a few hours.  The learning side of things was still as dismal and stress filled as ever.  University was a complete revelation to me, mainly because nobody ever complained about how many tea cakes you ate, and generally if you nipped off to the cafe for some sustenance and a break from the intellectual rigours of an academic life, you were more than likely to find your tutors there too.  That’s the spirit!

Jason was back at work today, and very grumpy about it.  He was also grumpy because he had a blood test before Christmas and the results have come back to suggest he needs to go on a low cholesterol diet.  He is quite miserable and his feathers are all droopy.  I totally understand this, as anyone who tells me that I ought not have that second piece of cake is likely to be spending some time searching for their head in the undergrowth as I register my disapproval of their remark.  Because of this I rarely allow blood samples to be taken, or in fact any other medical tests to be carried out , just in case they need to break some bad news.

Just before Oscar was born I got pre-eclampsia, which is basically pregnancy related hypertension.  I have probably mentioned all this before.  I can’t remember what I’ve told you and what I haven’t now.  Just ignore me if you’ve heard it all before.  Sing amongst yourselves.  I’m sure I’ve repeated nine million things in the space of this blog so far, and if you actually went back through it, you could fit all the salient points on one piece of A4 paper.  Oh well!

Back to pre-eclampsia. I had it with Tilly, and after she was born it didn’t come down for a while because oddly enough life with a small baby can be quite stressful.  The hospital refused to take me off my blood pressure medication after Oscar’s birth because they were worried I might have a heart attack.  The medication gave me splitting headaches, but only for twenty four hours a day.  If we add this to mastitis, a new baby, recovering from a caesarean scar and looking after two other kids, you will see that the headaches were just one step too far, even by my long suffering standards.

I demanded to be taken off the medication and was told that I was being silly.  I pointed out that even though I had been on the medication for weeks my blood pressure was actually the same as before.  It hadn’t got better, and it hadn’t got worse, but I did have lovely headaches now as an added bonus.  The wise old doctor told me that we couldn’t be sure that it the medication wasn’t stabilising my blood pressure, and that if I came off it, I might get worse and die horribly.  I pointed out that at least I would die without a headache, which seemed a fair trade off to me, given that I’d now had a headache for about a month.

The doctor told me off for being a ’silly girl’ who was too flippant about her health.  I pointed out that I was a thirty four year old ’silly girl’, and even if I was silly I thought I might be allowed to make a decision about my own welfare, especially about the way I might die, because if I didn’t get rid of the headache soon I was going to personally cut my head off in the middle of his surgery, and that surely wouldn’t be good for his blood pressure.  He’d just had it redecorated and replaced the thirty year old copies of Country Life with something a bit more modern and zeitgeisty (five year old editions of Prima with the covers ripped off and all the crossword’s done), we reached a compromise.

We agreed to differ.  I agreed that I would pretend to take the medication so that he could feel better. He agreed to believe me.  I went home and threw the pills in the toilet.  Jason bought me a blood pressure machine from the chemist so that we could have an official record of my impending death.  I gave it to my dad after a fortnight, but kept the box in the cupboard so that Jason would think I was still looking after myself.  I haven’t checked my blood pressure since.  To be fair to me, it is quite hard, with only a cardboard box. 

I expect that with my temperament and the things that have happened recently I am liable to explode at any moment.  Luckily I will die in blissful ignorance.  Please don’t send flowers.  Donate books to a local children’s home.  I will be having a toga funeral in mid-December and a full requiem mass (they will keep the body on ice if I inconveniently die during a more balmy season).  The reason being that everyone will be so pissed off with me that they won’t have time to cry.  They will all be glad I’m gone.

My dad, who as we know, loves a good illness, is blissfully happy with his blood pressure machine.  In the first few weeks he would check it twenty times a day, as a new hobby.  Thankfully he hasn’t found all the medical websites that are available via Google yet, or he would probably be laid out on the kitchen table jabbing himself with pastry brushes and getting my mum to write things down on a clipboard for fourteen hours a day.  I believe mum has hidden the machine somewhere, as the bleeping was beginning to drive her mad.  Her hiding technique is so foolproof it will never be found again, and Mr Tumnus will be able to check his blood pressure to his heart’s content for the rest of eternity (for those of you who missed this entry, my mother’s wardrobe leads to Narnia.  Fact.)

Because Jason is so miserable about the possibility of an impending diet (we are still in discussions about it.  I don’t mind, as I actually eat a healthy diet, apart from the cakes, which are an optional extra.  He is opposed to it on the grounds that pies are not allowed.) he has compounded it by deciding he might stop smoking soon as well.  This is quite worrying, as I find that doing one stressful thing at a time is quite enough without piling on the misery.  I feel that we may have to swap roles.  I will cede him the house and garden in exchange for sole access to the garage.  It may be the only thing that will save my sanity.