The Day to Davis

There’s been poorliness a-plenty in the DtoD hovel this week. Our eldest has had ’slap cheek’ a horrible flu like virus accompanied by a neon rash that appears on the cheeks and makes its way down the body. It’s like something from the Victorian era crossed with Alien. It’s knocked our usual merry soul for six and has meant loss of sleep and general tetchniness for all.

We should really have been alerted to the seriousness of the situation when he chose a bottle of water at the cinema for his treat. A bottle of water. Water?! WATER? My god! We should have immediately contacted the emergency services, bundled him into a turbo-bulance and headed straight for the King of hospitals. But no, not on our watch.  We had planned a walk after the cinema so a walk it would be. Here is our poorly son protesting about walking by holding on for dear life to a tree.

I'm ill. I don't feel like going for a walk. You can't see me. I'm a tree.

He managed about 40 minutes which was pretty damned impressive. The sight of him in tears, torrential rain, half a million dogs appearing out of nowhere and running straight at us through the woods and the youngest needing a poo was enough to make us call it a day. Since then he has been tucked up on the sofa softly moaning and eating the occasional dry cornflake.

It’s horrible when the children are ill. Nothing makes you feel more powerless than seeing them in pain. There’s fear, crying & a lot of bodily fluids – and that’s just you when you hear them waking up again in the night. They expect, they need you to make everything alright again. When something uninvited breaches the walls of your home and your routine it’s a nasty reminder of fragility.

I know he’s going to be completely better in a day or so. But they’re made of  hopes and dreams, theirs and your own, and as adult you know how fragile those can be. Sometimes childhood can seem like such a lawless, brutal place. So it’s good to have a day or two to stop the clock, hold them tight and keep them safe indoors before you release them back out into the wild.

Tags: gin, illness, Kids

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.