Last night echoes of my threatened violence if the coughing didn’t stop rang in my ears. Ady woke up around 1am, staggered down the stairs and was noisily and violently sick (sorry Sarah!) – I tried to block that out but suddenly heard a scared little voice saying ‘Nic, there’s blood in my sick’. So I had to go and take enough of a peek to confirm that yes, there was indeed a fair bit of blood in it. So then he spent the rest of the night continuing to be sick and I spent it lying awake worrying that I had inadvertantly put some horrid curse on him.
He was still adamant he was going to work this morning – he cannot recall ever taking a day off sick and I certainly don’t remember him ever doing so since we’ve been together but I hid his shoes and keys and made him a doctors appointment instead. I’d been reassuring him all night that he had probably just torn something with his violence in retching but secretly I was pretty worried too. This was not helped this morning by getting out our medical encyclopedia (dangerous book!) and following the yes/no flowchart for vomiting to vomit with blood to see it read ‘Medical Emergency. Call Ambulance.’ 🙁
So he duly rang in sick, went over the road to the docs and was sent home again to rest and see if it was just a tear or of it continued in which case he’d need to go to hospital for a camera down the throat or something. I rang his boss to explain and packed him off to bed. He has had loads of sleep, not been sick since although he now has diarrhoea which reassures me that it is indeed some sort of bug or food poisoning rather than anything more sinister. He’s eaten and is looking slightly less like he should be lying on a slab in a morgue and was even up to staying home alone with the children while I took some library books back and fetched in some soup for him. (I did leave Davies with strict instructions to call an ambulance under various circumstances and ran through the process for doing so with him again which we do every so often whenever I am overcome with fear of some sort of hideous accident whereby he has to save all our lives and end up getting some child of courage award from Carol Vorderman!). He is now talking of hoovering and is currently changing our bed linen so he seems to be returning to form anyway. Bit scary that for a while though… And don’t worry fellow Melrosers, we won’t bring anything horrid with us and we’ll make sure we are out of possible contamination times.
My friend who I saw at Sainsburys a couple of weeks ago and who promised she’d come round actually did just that this morning. Her and I were very close a few years back, we used to go clubbing together when we were 17/18 and I believe her mother blamed me for leading her astray 😉 She’s also called Nic and has the same colour hair as me so we were fairly well known and noticable together. Around the time that we got married she went off to be a holiday rep for a couple of years in Tenerife so our lives took fairly different paths for a time but now she is married and settled back down in Worthing, thinking about maybe having children at some point soon and suddenly we seem to have plenty to talk about again, if only me reassuring her that children are not actually as awful as we both always imagined them to be.
So we sat drinking tea and reminiscing about old times, catching up with gossip on mutual friends, she told me all about her wedding and her husband, I told her all about motherhood and Home Education, we both talked about plans to move abroad or certainly to a cheaper part of the country and generally had a really nice couple of hours.
The children were utter superstars throughout. I suppose because they didn’t know her and because she didn’t try to talk to them really they pretty much ignored us and were very caught up in their game of something to do with sticklebricks and geomags. After a while they disappeared into the playroom where they got the duplo out and then Davies came and got a tray from the lounge. When I asked him why he needed it he said ‘I think you better come and check actually Mummy, I’m not sure if what I’m doing is being naughty!’ :-D. He was making a ‘dinosaur exhibition’ on the tray using cement from his mini bricks house building kit and his plastic dinosaurs, which we decided was not naughty as it was creative and would require no more clearing up than a quick hoover! They also played with their musical instruments (forgot to mention that they played on the piano at my parents yesterday for ages. They love it and although they both refuse my offer of some sort of lessons or help they are excellent at ‘playing’ music to tell a story (favourites being giants and fairies using either end of the keys) or be happy or sad. They are also both very gentle with it and actually use one or two keys (which manage to sound like proper chords) at a time which I have seen far older children not manage to pull off in favour of banging the hell out of it) telling some sort of story, Davies played with the red button on various children’s channels for ages, they watched the end of Words & Pictures and two shows of Starship on Class TVand Scarlett played with some magnetic Dora books for ages too.
Nikki left and Ady resurfaced from bed so he fed the children while I shot off to the library and back. We had a fairly nondescript afternoon watching various stuff on TV, keeping the fire burning and everyone but me ate soup. It was that sort of day!
We realised just before Davies was about to go up to bed that we’ve not read our Bob book for today so rather than go and dig it out I wrote down three sentences for him to read instead. ‘Davies sat on Daddy’s lap’, ‘Mummy is on the sofa’ and ‘the cats sat by the fire’. Obviously ‘the’, ‘mummy’, ‘daddy’ and ‘Davies’ are words he can sight read. ‘Lap’, ‘cat’, ‘sat’, ‘on’ and ‘is’ were one’s he’s either come across or were easy to sound out and then ‘by’, ‘fire’ and ‘sofa’ were new ones. He read the first one effortlessly and with minimal help from an amazed Ady who has not seen him doing any reading at all he managed the other two. He declared it ‘fun’ and then set about wandering round the lounge looking for other words to try and read! 😯 To say I am amazed, delighted and thrilled would be an understatement – this was the only point I had fretted about thus far with HE and autonomy and suddenly he has finally clicked that not only is it possible, something he can do and actually good fun, he is actively asking for and looking for more and more things to read. Hurrah, hurrah and thrice hurrah! 🙂 :need a woohoo smilie:
So that’s us – all very knackered, most of us on soup diets but fingers crossed we make it that far and that long really looking forward to – and in great need of – a holiday!
Oh blimey, hope Ady’s feeling much much better tomorrow 🙁 Poor love.
We can get Lije and Davies reading their Bob books together next week then 🙂
Comment by Alison — 06 February 2006 @ 8:43 pm
Oh yuck. I was in hospital with Frans once, while pregnant with Maddy and caught a bug. I threw up blood filled vomit copiously all over the childrens ward.
The nurses were completely unimpressed by my near death symptons and sent me to A&E so i wouldn’t infect their children!
Rotters.
Hope he is better soon. Reading explosion happening here too, very exciting to see it happen second time around!
Comment by Merry — 06 February 2006 @ 8:50 pm
Poor darling. Give him my love xxx
Buzz has really taken to this reading lark also! It’s cool isn’t it 🙂
Comment by Roslyn — 06 February 2006 @ 9:05 pm
Poor him. I coughed up really rather a lot of blood when I was ill, so hopefully just that – none coming out the other end, I take it? (I’ve no shame, I’ll ask anyone anything ;-))
Comment by Joyce — 06 February 2006 @ 9:20 pm
I did ask but he said he couldn’t see any blood and it was too unpleasant to look too closely. (similarly no shame, will answer anything too!)
Comment by Nic — 06 February 2006 @ 10:11 pm
(((((Ady)))))) So Davies is reading now then – well done D xxx
Comment by karen b — 06 February 2006 @ 10:55 pm
Hope he is better soon….you must have read my mind about Melrose 😉
I was thinking “OH NO I dont want us to get ill!!!” hehe
Take care
Do I sound selfish? I dont mean too…;) x
Comment by Leandra — 06 February 2006 @ 11:46 pm
((Ady)) hope he is feeling better soon.
And definitely Woo and very Hoo for Davies’ new enthusiasm for reading! Sounds like he’s ‘got it’!
Comment by Ali — 06 February 2006 @ 11:53 pm