Broncho-thing

Daniel saw the doctor yesterday. We'd got to the point of desperation, his temperature was at 38°c and calpol seemed to be having no effect - a rare failure for the magic pink - and the effluvia of sick had become a grim constant. He was ashen faced, had grey circles under his eyes like big smudges of soot and had become quite lethargic.
The appointment was twenty past twelve and of course at about eleven Daniel decides that he will have a bit of a breast feed after all and actually he's feeling quite hungry so a good long feed.... which he kept down so by the time we got to the doctors he'd perked up and wasn't looking anything like so ill. Typical.
The doctor did take a good long look at my snot encrusted and slightly nasty smelling pink happy baby and decided that - gross alert - the vomiting was being caused by him swallowing mucus rather than letting it stream out the usual way. He also had a viral chest infection called broncholitis or bronchiolitis or broncho-something thing anyway. It's another childhood illness that we should be immune to by the time we're two. Joseph probably had it at some point too, but he never seemed to ever get properly ill.

Auto-correct is having a field day today. Bronx geometry is what it replaced broncho-something the first time. It then tried 'so etching'. It also tried 'author correct'. Yeah....

Daniel has a cough like a 40 a day smoker at the moment. It's horrible, it wakes him up in the night - and me for that matter. Few things are sadder sounding than a little baby hacking away. His face turns red and his little tongue pokes out and his eyes water. There are no medicines I can give that can help the cough although calpol and calprofen given alternately seem to have brought his temperature down at last.
I hope he sleeps tonight. I took the morning off today, just relaxing in bed with Netflix and cups of tea. Still had to feed Daniel a lot but he did sleep for a while and he spent some time with Andy so I almost got some sleep too. I'm still coughing away myself and the congestion in my ears is set like concrete. I'm sick of hearing everything like I'm underwater or like one fateful morning when I took my earplugs out and thought I'd gone deaf in one ear as half of the foam plug had remained behind. Thank goodness for needle nosed pliers!
I can't hear very clearly and if there's background noise I can't hear at all. I had a fright one night when I went to sleep on my right hand side leaving my worst affected ear upwards. I woke up and could not hear Daniel breathing so cue the panic. Daniel even when he's well is something of a noisy breather. As he's ill the noise has got quite striking. I thought it was something akin to someone trying to finish the last of a thick milkshake through too thin a straw. Andy thinks it's more like someone trying repeatedly to start a petrol motor chainsaw.

That's So Sick.

Whoever it was who went on about the innocence of babes clearly didn't have experience of what comes flowing out of them with depressing regularity.
Daniel is teething. Not a boy to do things by halves he is having two bottom teeth and four top teeth coming through all at the same time - at Christmas. Lovely.
Ah Joseph, my somewhat neglected older child whose delightful innocence and naivety reawakened my joy of Christmas from its coma of cynicism and who breezed through teething like it wasn't happening. He had a day or so of being a little out of sorts and lo and behold - two teeth! After that they popped up regularly and sometimes I'd look in his mouth and notice more had appeared as if by magic! No teething gel needed in our house!
Daniels started a week ago and he's still not done. The bottom tooth pierced the gum but is still no more than a few millimetres of stub and one of the top teeth has broken through too - but again, still pretty stubby.
He's always been quite an emotional chap. Where Joseph was happy to be put down or cuddled or left to bounce in his chair while I got on with stuff, Daniel is not and has never been so. Daniel has left me with whole days one after the other where I've accomplished literally nothing because whenever I've put him down he's screamed like he's being tortured. It all came down to whether I felt more guilty about the screaming or the neglected household chores.
Add the misery of teething to a baby already permanently on the edge then you might begin to realise how things have been for us.
Did I mention we've also been quite ill? Ever since Joseph started Pre school we've been inundated with colds and bugs and nasties. I'm suffering with what I believe to be my fifth cold in a row, but I'm not sure, they've rather run together so it's hard to tell. There may have been more.
Daniel is snotty too, the poor chap hasn't escaped the germ onslaught. He's tired as he's not been sleeping well, he's got a perma cold and lots of teeth on the way and the poor little mite is so overwhelmed  by it all he keeps being sick.
There seems no rhyme or reason to it, sometimes it's breakfast, sometimes lunch. Sometimes he'll keep his dinner down and sometimes not. Often his bottle of milk will want to revisit. Today I wondered if he might be weaning himself off me as he didn't seem to want to feed, so I gave him a bottle instead. As it turned out he was refusing to feed as he knew his tummy was upset and the bottle contents landed on the floor and all down my leg. Daniel escaped the flow, with the exception of his feet. This lead to an emergency rinse of his sock-ons as the other pair were still in a plastic bag having suffered a similar fate the previous day.
I have spent quite some time cleaning sick out of a v-tech crawl and learn ball with the aid of a cocktail stick. My rug has stains on it that probably won't shift and I had been hoping to avoid doing laundry over Christmas, but here we are. All the calpol and teething gel in the world aren't stopping the flow and every time he coughs or hiccups I get very nervous. Also, baby food looks identical coming back as it does going in. Odd.

All I wanted for Christmas was his his two front teeth

When Joseph teethed we hardly noticed. Well - we did notice, where before there were just pink gums, there were pearly whites and a little boy who quickly learned not to chew his fingers.
Daniel is really not the same baby. Well I obviously he's not the same baby as that would mean some sort of space time anomaly, but as they're closely related I had rather assumed they'd be rather similar. Physically they are, but personality? No, they're not remotely alike.
Joseph was a sanguine baby, Daniel is not. Joseph was happy to play on his play mat while I got on with household jobs. Daniel, even at nine months really isn't keen on being put down. He's clingy, but is also really rather cuddly and Joseph wasn't so much.
Daniel is having a rough ride with his teeth. He's nine months old and still gummy, but the gums got lumps in them a little while ago. Naively I assumed they'd pop through as fast as Joseph's did, but so far no. One of the bottom teeth has broken through, but it is still just a stubborn little stub poking out rather than a proper tooth.
When cuddling him yesterday he tipped his head back and I noticed clear lines in his upper gums showing his top front teeth are on the way. Poor chap, all four in the way at once, no wonder he's uncomfortable and he's still fighting off the tail end of a cold.
I sound calm. This is because after several nights of wrecked sleep Andy made me take a couple of nights on the sofa bed so I could catch up. Daniel behaved well on the first night for him, but not so well on the second.
As for last night? We all slept in the same room for once! Well, when I say slept I mean Daniel slept and Andy slept and I just plain didn't. I lay uncomfortably awake for nearly two hours, managed to doze for about four and then lay awake again. Aware that Daniel was doing well for once I decided it wasn't fair on Andy to be bothered by a sleepless person again I have decamped downstairs. Fringe is on Netflix, the sofa is comfy, the cat is asleep and I have a cuppa. Could be worse!

The Christmas Letter

Well it's been a good year in the Card household. After Andy's promotion to CEO we decided we needed a residence befitting his new status. Also we decided that Windsor wasn't quite the location for us, Belgravia is much nicer. We're also wondering if we should take the plunge and buy the holiday cottage in Cornwall, but now we think it might be better to look further afield, perhaps Tuscany.
The new house is just what we wanted. The extra reception rooms make life so much easier and in this house the pool is heated, much more pleasant! However we do miss the jacuzzi section in the pool in the old house so we'll probably have to get one fitted.
Of course we'll have to take on another maid, I'll be talking to the agency after Christmas as it's so hard to get anything done this time of year! It might be nearly Christmas, but some of us do have important things to do. I must have a word with them, the last pool cleaner was no good at all.
The boys now have a playroom each now so no more fights over who gets to play with the big train set as there's room for two now. At four years old Joseph is doing well at school, he's been bumped up again as he's really getting on so much faster than the children his own age. He's just finished reading Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol and I really must have a word with the teacher as it's far too simple a book for him. We've started on some basic calculus at home as the maths class is going to slowly for him. I'll probably have to make another 'donation' to the school to make sure he's being given what he needs, but that is the advantage of a good private school!
Daniel is now nine months old and is talking, only simple sentences right now but he does say some sweet things. He's walking confidently and his nanny tells me he's getting on well with potty training too.
We'll be spending the festive season in Lapland this year, we've found that the alpine resorts we used to go to have just got too touristy now. Nothing spoils a good holiday like crowds of the hoi-polloi.
Of course due to the extra demands on Andy's time we've not had as many holidays this year as we'd like but we did manage to fit in two weeks in Florence and a trip up the River Nile. It wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped, the great pyramid at Giza isn't as big as I was expecting.
The butler has just informed me that the Fortnum and Mason order has arrived and they've sent the wrong kind of pâté so I'll have to talk to someone about that, someone will surely lose their job as I can't abide it when the little people screw up, they should know their place.
Oh, some good news now, the builders have arrived to build the new helipad on the roof. That'll make shopping trips so much simpler!
All the best, hope you all have a good year, but not as good as mine of course.

In The Nightmare Garden

Words cannot express just how much I hate..

The tombiliboos - or however the heck you spell it. I hate them, I truly and deeply hate them and the silly little blobs on their heads. I hate their silly trousers that always fall down - just buy belts you silly little blob people!
I hate In The Night Garden. It's just about the worst program on CBeebies at the moment. It's so teeth gratingly awful I don't know why anyone watches it ever, except that Joseph has started to.
It's my fault. I taught him how to select the programs he wanted from CBeebies iPlayer as I was usually too busy with feeding Daniel to get up. At first all this meant was lots and lots of Octonauts, which was bearable if a little repetitive at times. I know a lot about fiddler crabs now.
The issue was that he soon worked out how to do more than choose the next program in the series, he could see other things he liked the look of....

Oh my son. You used to have such good taste in telly. If it wasn't Aardman, he just wasn't interested. He loved Timmy Time and Shaun the Sheep and as for Wallace and Gromit - well one lunch time he told me "Cracking toast, Mummy!" and wanted to know if we could build a rocket under the house. Alas we have no basement.

I should explain that we do not have "proper" telly in our house. We have, instead, a good quality Internet connection which gives us access to most freeview stuff anyway and we also pay for Netflix which supplies Joseph with enough Disney films to keep him happy as well as Thomas the Tank Engine. We used BBC iPlayer every now and then for something that looked good and bought some DVDs of the stuff he really liked thus ensuring that the BBC did get some money from us in the end.
Now I have to hide the mouse if we watch iPlayer. I can cope with the odd episode of Tree Fu Tom, which is pretty bad and even Nina and the Neurons which is a bit educational but it all went to pot on holiday.
If he was good he got a bit in the morning and the CBeebies bedtime hour at the end of the day. We were subjected to Abney and Teal - I hate this show too but it was only one episode at a time - and the true dire hell that is In The Night Garden. I'm not going to pay a licence fee if they're going to waste it on that bilge water! That's when he saw it for the first time and fell for its heroin like addictiveness.
I feel sorry for Upsy Daisy I have to admit, forced to dance for the evil Iggle Piggle and his creepy blanket. She must dance with him and keep a smile on her poor face..... As for the Macca Pacca, that poor chap needs a therapist for his obsessive behaviour before it gets totally out of hand.
It's the tombliboos I really hate. They are the evil masterminds of the whole creepy place. I hate they way they make poor Derek Jacobi narrate it. What did the poor man do to deserve such a punishment? I imagine him in tears after each reading whimpering "I used to do Shakespeare you know!"
I hate the insidious theme music that sticks in the brain like glue and is harder to remove than a migraine, also leaving you feeling nauseous and emotional. It sits in the back of your brain quietly and creeps on out when you least expect it, when you're doing the shopping for example and you find yourself humming the sanity rotting ditty and it just wont stop! You want to scream and rip your own ears off, but in the middle of Sainsburys you look a bit odd.
I really and truly hate how they make the wretched thing last half an hour.

Ill Again

Joseph hadn't got over the first head cold before falling ill with the second. It's the main down side to education, the sheer number of kids who aren't kept home when they're ill so they share their bugs and nasties about with all and sundry.
I went to pick him up from pre-school yesterday and was confronted by the sight of a red faced and crying little boy, clutching onto his right ear a lot. He had, in the last ten minutes of the session, suddenly changed from his usual happy and cheeky self to a sad little heap. They didn't know why, but thought he was a little ill.
I asked him if he wanted to go straight home or have our usual Tuesday café stop. Not even illness can stop Joseph from wanting to go to a café, so we went. Andy came to meet us, he likes a late lunch hour does my Andy and works only a short walk from the café we like to stop in.
Joseph began to realise how ill he was. His ear was hurting and he didn't feel like his usual babychino with the marshmallows so had a cold drink instead. I presented him with his usual packet of wafers that he likes and he promptly burst into tears again. He did not feel like eating.
Oh dear, if even wafers can't tempt him then he must be really ill. He cried and it got louder and louder leaving poor Andy and I with nothing to do but finish our respected decaf and full-fat coffees as quickly as possible and carry poor Joseph the short walk across the precinct to the doctors surgery. Joseph screaming that his ear hurt the entire time and I was having visions of pussy ear infections, horrible antibiotics and nasty consequences. I kept my fears to myself, no point upsetting the poor little chap any more than necessary.
Good news, there was an appointment available if I didn't mind a short wait. Joseph looked like he needed a rest before attempting the walk home anyway so I said ok and sat down to wait. Joseph alternated between wanting me to cuddle him the whole time and wanting to go and play. I told him he couldn't play as there was a good chance he had something infectious and I didn't want to risk him passing it on.
I've talked to him about germs before, and he seemed to understand the idea when he had a head-cold. "I've got little germs living up my nose, Mummy?"
Yes Joseph, and they're trying to escape in your snot.
He was unconvinced until Daniel decided that he'd been in the buggy quite long enough now thanks and really wanted a cuddle. Joseph decided that my lap was not for sharing and decided he really was too ill to play and wanted me to hold him.
Worried now that all I was in fact doing was wasting the doctors time and annoying everyone sat in the waiting room I got up when called for Joseph's appointment with a degree of trepidation.
Could the doctor look and see if he had a rash?
By all means, but it might be a little hard to tell as he's still covered in red marks from the chickenpox.
He did have a slight rash, on his cheeks and lower neck. Ears look a bit red inside and please open your mouth Joseph so we can take a look....
He didn't want to. He wouldn't be brave or pretend I was cleaning his teeth or anything so had to be gently but firmly made to co-operate by aid of a lolly stick. One red looking throat, but not pussy which is good news.
The bad news? Infection most likely caused by parvovirus B19 aka the Slapped Cheek virus so named as its victims exhibit red cheeks as if they'd been slapped. Josephs cheeks looked like they'd been aggressively exfoliated and then had aftershave put on them. They glowed like hot coals.
He does go pink when he cries, but not this much. Oh well then.
Got given a printed fact sheet and sent home with the message "Give plenty of fluids and keep him off school for a couple of days."
The bad news? People with this are most infectious for 4 to 20 days.... before the symptoms are visible. Once the rash is showing they're not infectious.
Great! So just who has he managed to pass it on to in the last week? Have I had it yet? My Mum's not sure, she thinks so but isn't 100%. You can catch it and not have any symptoms at all or you can be quite ill there's no way to tell. It's a good job all the pregnant women I knew have all had their babies as it can be nasty for them especially if they're pre twenty weeks.

Today he's looking better. There's still a blotchy rash on his cheeks, but it's less and he doesn't look like he's had a rouge accident so he's on the mend, I guess the magic pink calpol is doing it's job. I'll keep him off pre-school tomorrow anyway as per doctors orders but I'm having a hard enough time persuading him to rest today as it is. We've had to compromise a bit, he's staying in his room for now playing with his Chuggington trains with the order to lie in bed if he feels tired or ill. He hasn't yet.

No sleep for the tired

How does one persuade a baby to sleep when he's not convinced?
He'll take a dummy now, which helps, but on its own is no good. You can put him in his cot, give him his dummy, walk away....
He cries, oh he cries. He's tired, you can tell by all the eye rubbing, but still he cries and he doesn't stop.
I cuddle him, he calms down so I put him back.
He keeps crying.
I give him a feed, that settles him down after some initial fussing. He calms down, the breathing slows, the eyes droop....
I put him in his cot and step back slowly....
He wakes up and cries.
I give him his dummy, he sucks on it looking rather cross and makes a sort of "Omly omly omly" noise, well aware that he's not getting what he wants.
I leave the room anyway, thinking to myself that he is tired and that given some time he'll have to give in.
He doesn't give in. The crying gets louder and louder and louder.
I give in first, I try the dummy again and it is spat out. I cuddle him and he arches his back like a banana, making it hard to hold him. He is letting me know in no uncertain terms that he is not at all happy with the current situation and if it continues then there will be hell to pay.
I try feeding him again, he's not interested.

An hour later I try again, repeat all steps as above with the same result. He hasn't got bags under his eyes, but a whole set of matching luggage. Sleep you little thing! You'll feel so much better. He droops and dozes for a moment, but wakes immediately and if I'm daft enough to put him in the cot... well, you'd think the wretched thing was made of boiling hot lava, the way he reacts!

Give up. Get a cup of tea and sit glaring at the news headlines on the computer with evil babe from the depths of hades squiggling on my lap. Ho hum, lots of stuff happening in the news today... check facebook....
Evil babe has stopped squiggling... he's only gone and gone to sleep just like that!
Load up program on Netflix, sit down slowly on sofa and try not to move....
Realise I've left tea by computer out of reach......

Daniel is definitely a coyote baby. If you get him asleep and go to put him down you find yourself asking whether you'd rather chew your own hand off than risk waking him by removing it from under him......