Other shoe. (Third shoe.) Dropping.

I don't particularly want to talk about the fact that Monkey barfed up all his apple juice and cheerios just before we left for school this morning, meaning that we didn't get to leave for school and Mabel and I also didn't get to meet up with friends at the playground on this, possibly the last day of lovely mild weather before it gets cold again, and how instead I spent most of the day lounging in front of the tv, gingerly enquiring as to the state of his tummy, and finally feeding them both ice cream at IKEA, which may not go down in history as the healthiest turned-out-to-be-dinner ever.

Okay, so the end part wasn't so bad. And when he's lying inert on the sofa Monkey is really very sweet and it stops him jumping on his sister. But still. Not the day I'd envisaged to lead us into the five-day weekend (from his school's point of view). He even missed their Thanksgiving feast, not that he cared as he wouldn't have eaten anything and had missed most of the run-up to it last week. I was working hard on priming him to try some cornbread, but now we'll never know...

You know, it's funny that I never needed a "sick kids" tag before last week. Just as well I'm not drawing any correlation between his finally totally weaning and all this getting sick he's been doing lately. To be fair, I don't think this even was a virus; I think it was just all the snot he'd been swallowing all night, plus a lot of coughing in his sleep, that finally revolted in his stomach and decided to come up again.

[We had discussed how it might be a stomach bug that he had caught or could pass on to other people. Later in the day, when he was still feeling a bit fragile, he said to me: "I think maybe there is a beetle in my tummy."]

You may think that ice cream is not well-advised food for someone with a dodgy tummy. You might be right; we'll see. But I distinctly remember that, when I was small and had a pain, I used to ask for ice cream because that would make it better. My parents, naturally, thought I was trying one on. The thing is, they must have given in, at least some of the time, because I know that it always worked. That was what I was thinking of when I agreed that we could go to IKEA just for ice cream this afternoon. We even went in the exit doors to do it, because sometimes you have to rebel just a little.