Sick

I love the Wife. She's bright and funny and warm, clever and a fantastic mum*. She works very hard ("full time worker, full time mum") and regularly brings home gifts from work. Sadly, because she's a nurse, these gifts generally end up with one or all of us pointing one or both ends at a toilet.

When the Boy was about six months old I got a text message from the Wife saying that he was sick, and it might be because there was a bug going round at the hospital. By the time I got home, the Wife was yelling "Ralph!" down the toilet, and within two hours I was earning the Native American name "Both Ends Running." There's no dignity in these situations. Hosing down a vomit soaked child is unpleasant enough as it is. Particularly when its your vomit. Having to start over because you accidentally did it again is a rare and awful kind of frustrating.

You think its not so bad when they're a little older because they have some understanding why they're ill, and what they can do to get better.

"My bum can't fall off because I'm holding it on."

But its never that straightforward.

"If you eat nothing but sweets you'll get ill, fat and your teeth with fall out."

"Oh. Does uncle Bill eat a lot of sweets?"

They can become weird hypochondriacs

"I hope my nipple doesn't fall off."

Or worse they start to think you're falling apart

"I think mummy looks ill. She needs rouge."

The fact of the matter is that the vomit, crying and re mortgaging the house to buy a metric ton of Calpol are a small price to pay for the one upside to sickness. Peace. Oh yes, after the walls, carpet and Xbox have been liberally coated in semi-digested turkey twizzlers they curl up into a ball and fall asleep. Sometimes for days. And whilst the grandparents are cooing and saying "Bless, they're poorly..." you find yourself holding out for something more than just a 24 hour bug. Earlier this year the Niece got chickenpox and the Wife and I spent hours rubbing our Kids against her until they came out in spots. It wasn't so they caught chickenpox early. No, we fancied a lie-in over the weekend.

You might think this is cruel, and you'd be partly right. But you have to remember, when parents get sick there's no climbing into bed with a teddy, a warm duvet and a copy of Heat magazine. Oh no, you might be dry heaving into the sink but you still need to wipe their bums. On one occasion I came down with something my doctor brilliantly diagnosed as a "non specific virus"(leading me to observe "So you don't know what it is then.") Symptoms included not being able to move off the sofa without passing out and... well, pretty much that really. I managed to pick the Boy up from school, cook dinner, give him a bath and got most of the way through reading him a book before I fell asleep. I was woken up by him with the words

"Wake up daddy, its time for me to go to bed."

These words were delivered by sympathetically shouting them into my ear. Sympathy is not within my Kids vocabulary. The closest I've ever come to any form of pity was

"You woke me up last night doing a noisy poo."

We don't help ourselves though. I foolishly left the cap half done up on a bottle of Calpol once and the Boy, being the enterprising chap he is, fetched a spoon and fed himself half of it because he had a cold. Off to hospital we went. He was fine in the end thankfully (in fact, it got rid of his cold completely). Unless you've been there you can't understand what it feels like to be responsible for your child overdosing on medicine. I wanted to hurl myself under a bus. Two nurses and a doctor told me it was very common and they'd overdosed their own children too. Apparently that was meant to be reassuring. We don't go to that hospital any more.

And if I'm not endangering my children with medicine (not, I should add, that I've done that since), then its my Wife trying to poison them with Spaghetti Bolognaise. Oh at first it was okay, but then later came the crying and the screaming.

"I don't want it!"
"Eat it! Your mum cooked it for you and its lovely!"
"But I don't like it!"
"You love spaghetti! Stop complaining! EAT IT!"
"But daddy...!"
"I don't want to hear it! EAT IT OR I'LL TAKE ALL YOUR TOYS AWAY!"
"But my tongue's all fizzy!"
"I - Er, what?"

Turns out it was weapons grade chilli con carne. Oooh... the guilt. Still, its nice that we can look back on it an laugh. The Boy still talks about it now.

"I liked that dinner! But it made me cry..."


*Please note, as the Wife herself recently said, any reference to her is greatly embellished.