Thursday August 28th The Death of Hope

It is twenty past eight in the morning.  The children are downstairs.  They are ready for school.  We are green to go with time to spare.

I should be happy no?

No. I should not.

Oscar decided to throw up all over his cot from midnight until three this morning.  I ran out of bedsheets and had to use towels it was that good.  In between bouts of vomiting he was perfectly fine.  No temperature, no complaining, in fact, he wanted to play.  He wanted me to read the book Mr. Pusskins, about a billion times.  Which was nice.

Jason was kept awake, because when Oscar was actually being sick he was wailing a lot.  Understandable.  Nobody likes being sick. Unfortunately for Jason there was nowhere to move Oscar to without waking everyone else up and even with the electric fan on and the door closed he could still hear the wails of the boy, so he was up too.  He is shattered.  Work have over allocated him rather.  At the moment they are expecting him to cram seven and a half working days into five.  This morning he is due to attend five meetings between eight and eleven o’ clock and has four meetings running concurrently that he is supposed to be at later on this afternoon.  Having four hours sleep on which to achieve such Herculean feats is a fairly daunting prospect.

By three, things had calmed down a bit in our world of vomit.  I made a nest on Oscar’s floor and went to sleep with him chatting to me through the bars of his cage.  I now have incredibly stiff hips and an interesting neck arrangement where the pillow I was using, propped against a bean bag, skittered off into the night and I must have slept rather like those chalk outlines of murder victims.

This morning he hasn’t been sick, but he is pale and wan and refusing food and milk.  I cannot take the risk of sending him on his nursery trip to the farm in case he either a) vomits all the way and they have to bring him back or b) he doesn’t vomit but somehow manages to infect an entire nursery of small humans with whatever it is he has wrong with him.  I had to ring nursery and tell them he is staying with me today.  I didn’t tell them he was sick.  If I do that, he is not allowed back until he has stopped vomiting for forty eight hours which means that even if he’s as fit as a flea tomorrrow, he won’t be going then either.

So.  No first day off for me.  No hairdressers.  I will have to ring them later on and cancel my appointment.

What will I be doing today?  I will be doing what I have been doing for the last six weeks.  I will be looking after small children with no respite and probably scraping vomit out of the rugs.  Sometimes, sometimes, I really hate my life.  If I were a parrot, today I would be a naked parrot.