Plague II

Mabel woke up in the middle of the night to remark, "That's what was in my eye, Mummy. It's a plant." I saw in the half-light from the hallway that her lashes were encrusted with gunk.
"You have pinkeye," I told her. "Keep your eyes closed and I'll fix it in the morning." I think she was quite content to have the same thing as her big brother, and thankfully she went back to sleep.

A while later, I heard Monkey playing unquietly in his room. We are trying a new thing, where I have set an alarm clock in his room to go off at 7am, and the idea is that he will wait until then before waking Daddy up. (Since Daddy made him a jet pack out of cardboard, foil, and duct tape the other day because he'd had a lie in and was all fired up with enthusiasm for parenting, even Monkey can see the benefits of letting him sleep.)

Impressive jet pack. Happy boy, rear view.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is just awake too early to wait that long. And right now, since Daddy isn't here, I'm the one paying the price. He waited as long as he could, and then I heard him swish swish swish up the hall to us in Mabel's room. (I have discovered why he's so noisy moving about. He doesn't just pad, he slides along the nice shiny hardwood floors on his cold dry feet. Must get a rug.)

Anyway, after some private prevaricating, he appeared in the doorway like the ghost of morning to come, and whispered loudly that he couldn't wait any longer. Or something. We had a lot of whispered to-ing and fro-ing, each one ending with me telling him to go away, and with him leaving for half a second in order to fabricate the next reason why he had to come back in and ask me something else. I told him to put on his dressing gown, and then he claimed he couldn't get back into bed with it on, and didn't want to sit on the floor, and so evidently I had doomed him to just stand there, in the middle of his room, with nothing to do. "It's all a disaster," he gloomed, not leaving the side of the bed where Mabel was inching ever closer to waking up and I was doing everything in my power not to move and rouse her.

Of course, she did wake up, and annouced that she had a wee, and that was that for the morning. It's not the bedtimes that are so bad (for me, the one with the magic boobies) when single-parenting at this stage; but I really hate the mornings. When I finally got to look at the clock, it was all of 6.05am, which means Monkey was probably awake at 5.30 or so. Have we adjusted to winter time? I think not.

So now we have eyedrops, just in case it's bacterial rather than viral, which the doctor couldn't tell at this stage; and based on the amount of success I had putting Mabel's in her eyes, I think I've probably just paid $25 for a very tiny vial of nothing at all and I hope it is viral because I don't know if any of the (gold-coated, saffron-infused, diamond-encrusted) drops will ever go where they're supposed to.

And poor Monkey got a painful injection into the bargain because I asked for him to get the flu vaccine and they had to give him the shot instead of the nice easy nasal spray thingy I'd promised him (because he had a history of wheezing, which contra-indicates the mist), so he was feeling pretty hard done by. He will be needing a largeish bribe-present when we go back for his booster in four weeks. (Somehow he missed getting the second dose last year, possibly because we all had the swine flu itself and I thought two goes of the regular flu vaccine and one of the H1N1 were enough for any boy on top of having got the actual disease it was all supposed to be protecting against; but that means he needs the booster this year instead.)

And all the outing they got today was one to the doctor's in the morning and one to spend half an hour in each of two different drive-through pharmacy queues (the wrong one, and then the right one). Tomorrow we will have to go into the back garden and rake some leaves.

And now I must go to bed to prepare for round three. Tune in tomorrow night for another thrilling installment.