Bloggers are getting together to raise money for the people of Haiti by raising money to buy fantastic shelterboxes like these.
Please consider donating to The Bloggers for Haiti Just Giving page and help a family recover from the devastation of the earthquake.
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The British Mummy Bloggers Carnival is being hosted this week by A Modern Mother http://tinyurl.com/yhvmjck.
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Dec 17: It’s eleven o’clock and I’m making gifts for the boys’ teachers for tomorrow. I’m making them, and I’m looking at them, and I’m mostly thinking SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT THEM A BOTTLE OF WINE.
Dec 18: has mistaken ‘Christmas party’ at preschool to mean lunch not needed and sent her preschooler without. Bad mother. Sent sick-looking son to school party day at his request. Also, bad mother. But got gifts to all teachers. Good mother. Been a long morning, need breakfast.
Dec 20: is loving all the Christmas parties and is feeling really Christmassy 
Dec 21: Five children fed….. four children bathed, three kids down, too many chores and a gin and tonic calling me.
Dec 22: We have an unexpected house guest: and it’s not a welcome one.
Dec 22: Four dvds, three sheets washed, two sickie kids and a mother needing her immunity.
Dec 22: we read advent stories by candlelight: tonight, The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey
Dec 23: Four shirts ironed, three gifts made, two stomachs lined and a designated driver that’s not me
Dec 24: Our Christmas Eve traditions start with the tracking of Santa’s journey. The children are at fever pitch already with the thought that he’s started his journey. If the kids aren’t in bed tonight by the time he gets to Europe, he won’t visit our house. Works every year….
Dec 24: We’re still washing sheets here. I’m considering putting corks in both ends of the offending children. The Polar Express has everyone in good spirits though.
Dec 24: we read The First Christmas
Dec 24: the boys write letters to Father Christmas. Harry writes “please can I have a Lego Stars Wars desert skiff. If I can’t have that please can I have a new brain so I can understand Maths” I think I could do with one of those too. He also writes “I’ve been a really good boy this year” and Matthew and I nearly piss ourselves laughing.
Dec 24: we join family for Christmas afternoon tea and stuff ourselves with Christmas cake (must remember not to make myself sick for a change this year). We send the children’s letters to Father Christmas up the chimney and quickly distract them so they don’t see them fall back down the chimney and burn to a cinder in the fire.
Dec 24: we read The Night Before Christmas
Dec 24: we’re packed, wrapped and glass of wine in hand. Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas!
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Week three (last week) saw my eldest son Harry fall ill with swine flu, approximately five minutes before I was due to take William to his pretty crucial and long-awaited nephrologist appointment with the baby in tow while Matthew was going to take the other two children to school and then go on to work. It was all planned with military precision, lists prepared of who and what to drop where and with whom and who would pick up later at what predetermined time.
Then Harry appeared feverish and fluey.
I think this is where I am going wrong: when I plan, something unforeseen inevitably happens to cock it up. I should just chill a bit more. Then the gods wouldn’t be able to sit there saying, let’s see what will happen if we give her a fourth fever to deal with in three weeks on the most tricky day of the week – will she crack?
Nephrology appoinment accomplished and other various children back at home, I look after Harry who is not doing so well. (Although his behaviour is usually so bloody awful that I’m a little ashamed to admit that his illness is a respite for the rest of us and we carry on with an unusually calm – albeit housebound – version of normal family life.)
The gods are watching. Waiting.
On Wednesday evening he is clearly looking better but will still need a recuperative day off school. But I wake on Thursday with my throat feeling like it is on fire. I can barely speak. With all four boys misbehaving now their chief is back in the game, I am reduced to discliplining them with whispers.
It is an uncomfortable truth to realise that most of the noise in this busy, noisy household is made by me.
By the end of the day we are all (mostly) talking in whispers. It is amazing what a calming effect it has on everyone not to shout.
It is also amazing how searingly painful it is to have to shout at a really truly naughty boy when you have no voice.
By Thursday evening I feel cold and shivery and I call my husband and leave a message as he is in his daily crisis meeting with his US customer. Whether he could make out a single feverish croaked whisper I’ve no idea but it’s the last time we talk for several days, as I get all the children to bed, panic for a few minutes who is going to look after the children on Friday as Matthew has to be in the office (those pesky crisis customers) and then fall into a pig-shaped black hole of swine flu.
At least if the gods decided to throw swine flu at me, they gave it good and proper because there was no more fretting about who would look after the children: I was too ill to care. So I look on my five day fun with swine flu as a chance to, if not physically switch off because not even I could call swine flu a holiday, then mentally switch off from the constant job of parenting.
Everything has its positive side. Even swine flu.
Photo credit: dylancantwell
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I endure a lot of Star Wars, and Star Wars induced violence, in this house what with five boys and everything (if ever I wished for a girl it would be to have some solidarity against Star Wars and all things like it) but this made me laugh:
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A second week with swine flu while the baby lay comatose on my chest; limp and intermittently fretful. On Tuesday I got up maybe three times to pee but otherwise I was stuck night and day holding my very poorly little fella. Matthew thankfully worked from home that day and did the school runs and picked up Tamiflu as Edward was too sick to move. I’d like to say I was quite creative in my enforced ’sit in’ but it’s amazing how much time you can spend looking at your clammy, sweating, shaking child and worry instead of getting on with making all those phone calls you can normally find a reason to put off and other tedious stuff. I did fill out a form that had been languishing in my in-tray since April (a metaphorical in-tray because I’m just not even organised enough to have an in-tray) and so I’m going to call the week a success. I’m a mother of four small children: I take my victories where I can.
It’s fair to say that trying to run a busy household with a sick baby in your arms is not easy and the week has passed in a bit of a tiring blur. There is some benefit though – if I thought I didn’t get anything much done in the course of the average day, you just need to see what the house looks like when I can’t do anything.
This weekend? The hope for a bit of sleep and alcohol will mostly be replaced by the reality of tidying, cleaning and doing laundry or else the house might implode from the chaos – although if it does, at least I can console myself with the fact that the house WOULDN’T ACTUALLY LOOK ANY WORSE.
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So despite all my precautions, swine flu has hit the household, four days after William got his first of the two swine flu vaccinations. I wasn’t allowed more than three days of semi-relief that he was partially protected because that would clearly have lulled me into a false sense of security. And as any mother knows, we are MEANT TO BE WORRYING ALL THE TIME.
So his little body lies pale and limply pathetic on the sofa next to me as he sweats his way through a fever of 40 degrees – after Calpol/Tylenol – with full-on shakes, bloodshot eyes and vomiting. You know it’s bad when even the promise of all-day children’s television doesn’t help.
I despatched a helpful neighbour off to school with one son, another helpful neighbour off to preschool with another son and a third helpful neighbour off to the chemist to get William’s Tamiflu. Thank heaven for them all because four housebound children and no Tamiflu for the one with H1N1 and an underlying condition, well I don’t even want to go there, and it’s not for worry about what could happen to the one with the underlying condition. There was, at least for a little while, peace while the baby and the sick one slept but then all hell broke loose when William starting vomiting the Tamiflu, the preschooler returned looking decidedly peaky, the older boy returned feeling cross that he had had to go to school without his brother (woe is me) and I wondered if I needed to pack a hospital bag for a little emergency stay with the boy while trying to get something on the table that at least one of them would feel like eating and tend to medicines, tempers and cooling their fevers (sick ones) and averting fights and tantrums (not-sick ones). Always fun, and right now with added fun!
After a second night of no sleep, I now have the preschooler lying pale and limp on the sofa watching Waybuloo which, let’s be honest, would make anyone feel a bit pale and limp and the older one possibly pulling a sickie after I was duped this morning by his attempt at vomiting, for now he seems just a little bit okay and William fainting every time he gets up (not sure if that’s the Tamiflu, the flu or the blood pressure tablets he is on doing their job just a little bit too well today). Now I’m just waiting for the baby to fall ill and then, the icing on the cake, MY TURN! Although I might secretly be looking forward to a few days in bed while someone else looks after everyone. (I know, I know, I won’t be saying that when I’ve really got ‘flu, but a girl has got to have something to look forward to.)
Still, at least I can Peppa my flu-laden tweets with witty hashtags like #hamdemic, #snoutbreak and #epigdemic – thereby proving I’m both internets-cool and dealing with this in a very mature, mother-like way.
Photo: be_khe
→ 5 CommentsTags: H1N1·swine flu·Tamiflu
I thought I would revisit why I blog, and why I am proud to be a mummyblogger (even though I’m not blogging that much while so much awful stuff is going on here).
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My youngest son is now a glorious seventeen months old. It’s a good age, seventeen months: old enough to make your feelings known, young enough to elicit a hug simply by looking up, eyes brimming with unshed tears, old enough to bait your brothers, young enough to have a mother’s unquestioning protection from them.
The last seventeen months have been a slog but I have – in some sort of masochistic way – enjoyed them. In the last month or two life has become easier, taken on a slower, less stressful pace. The baby (no longer a baby but always my baby) sleeps, eats, guided by days which have a gentle routine. I know his every expression and can anticipate almost every emotion that any one particular action will precipitate in his little body. I feel like a competent mother. And I am happy – sometimes startlingly so.
It wasn’t always like that. When my middle son, William, was seventeen months old I started this blog. For the first seventeen months of his life and for several months after that I was severely, desperately, unknowingly depressed. When I stumbled across the blogging world my world was absolutely, unutterably transformed. After a while I wrote:
writing this blog has helped me overcome some really dreadful times, given me a sense of purpose, given me a view beyond my little baby-driven world, allowed me to find other like-minded people and given me hours of fun reading some of the truly witty, poignant and clever blogs. ….. Part of the reason I suffered from postpartum depression is that I felt like I didn’t measure up to the stereotypes put forward in the media, I didn’t measure up to the parenting manuals, I didn’t measure up to how I thought every other mum was coping (nobody talks about depression, not really), I didn’t feel I had anything other to focus on than babies and I didn’t have anything other to focus on than my babies and how I wasn’t coping with them. Reading other people’s real experiences – not some biased media account, nor some parenting manual scenario – and hearing from other people in similar circumstances has helped me beyond measure.
Blogging is extraordinary: it has created networks of people with shared experiences, it allows us to make connections with others, it gives us an outlet where we can express ourselves without fear of judgement. Women, and mothers in particular, are a critical part of the blogging world, proof that the medium of blogging works so well in creating networks to share information and experiences and to support and empower each other, and in creating virtual villages in which we raise our children.
The blogging world, like life, is full of niches: politics, religion, opinions, everyday events, hobbies, hacks. No one area is any ‘better’ or any more important than another and to dismiss ‘mommyblogging’ as trivial is inaccurate. Mothers need each other and blogging is not only a logical extension of that desire to connect and to support one another, but a way of deconstructing the myths of motherhood and, in doing so, empowering all of us who take part in it.
How has blogging changed motherhood for you?
I’m spending quite a bit of time on Facebook these days. Please feel free to add me as a friend if you use Facebook – I’ve really enjoyed getting to know many readers in a more interactive forum. Here’s how to find me: my profile on Facebook. Just say you are a reader of this blog in your friend request.
Also I finally set up a Google account andI am gradually getting around to following my favourite blogs – if you want to follow me the button is in the right sidebar. I’m loking a little bit lonely over there by myself .
Lastly, I have a reciprocal blogroll and with Technorati gone crazy at the moment, please let me know if you have linked to me and I will add you to my blogroll.
In other news thank you for all the messages and emails of support over the issues my son is having. It never ceases to amaze me how supportive and kind people are and it helps to know that I am not dealing with this alone. Several of you have suggested places to turn or things to try and I am implementing some of those things. We’re not having the best weekend but I am trying to remain positive and see the humour in things. It’s either laugh or cry, and I’m done with the sobbing-wreck look.
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Life is not going well at the moment. Instead of blogging I have been attempting to take care of the problems in my family. Sometimes I go on the internet to google things like ‘how to discipline a child who doesn’t care about being disciplined’, ‘counselling for a child’ and other such things. School is part of the problem for him, but with his behaviour at rock-bottom, school is very definitely part of the solution for me. I could not have him at home all day with his behaviour like this because… I don’t know what, just because. I have coped with very serious post-natal depression, my child being diagnosed with a devastating disease and other life-related problems, but this? This is close to breaking me.
Photo: Now I’m Always Smiling
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