Another snapshot

It's been a while - but let's not dwell on that, eh?

Another snapshot from Life with Boys.  Boy #1 has been manfully fighting off a cold for the last couple of days.  This is the same cold his father succumbed to for a week.  When I say 'cold' it was of course more than that for Husband; it was a Man Cold. This required that he commandeer the only warm room in the house (the kitchen, obvs), so that despite his life-sapping illness he could continue work as best he could, from home.

In turn this required that everyone else vacate the kitchen (remember; the only warm room in the house) so that he could make calls, and do all the other Important Things that Couldn't Wait for him to recover. Needless to say, I was delighted when the cold lifted and the kitchen was no longer off limits.

Anyway, back to Boy #1. 

This morning, after a difficult night, he announced that he was too exhausted to go to school today.  Thinking back to Husband's illness last week I decided to go against normal practice - which is a) to check their temperature is normal and b) make sure they are not throwing up or the Other Thing and c) if both of the previous are fine, send them to school anyway - and let him stay home. Anything to avoid a teen with a Man Cold.

I know.  I am a soft touch.  Except, I haven't told you my dastardly plan yet.  It worked as follows:

Me:  'Ok, you can stay home....'

Boy #1: 'Thanks, Mum.'

Me:  'But!  I still want you to take a shower this morning, and then you can come down to breakfast with your pj's on. If you still feel rotten after that, you can go back to bed.'

Boy #1: 'OK.' (doing his best to look pale and wan).

After a healthy breakfast (Weetabix, scotch pancakes with maple syrup), Boy #1 started to make his way into the den, phone in hand.

Me: 'Where are you going?'

Boy #1:  'Into the den. To rest...'

Me:  'Oh, no.  If you're going to rest, you're going back to bed. All day.  And you're leaving your phone down here.'

An hour later, he reappeared.  'I've had a rest.'

Me: 'Great.  The tv's staying off though, and your phone is still off limits.  I recommend you go back to bed, really knock this thing on the head.'

Boy #1 paused.  'Ummm.  Actually, I think I'm ok to go to school.  If that's alright.'

What a difference a day makes...

Tasks completed on Day 1 of child home sick from school (with a temperature but not ill enough to spend the entire day in bed)

Child spends an extra 2 hours in bed reading instructive literature (OK, back copies of Top Gear magazine, but beggars can't be choosers)
English homework completed
4 sessions of Mathletics completed
Intelligent conversation over lunch
Short session on National Geographic kids website games section
TV switched at 4.00pm due to pompous statement that it shouldn't go on until the same time school would have finished
Mother's Tasks: Laundry, cooking (delicious nutritious home-made Moroccan lamb stew), overseeing entertainment of child.  Writing: grand total of approx 20 minutes.

Tasks completed on Day 2 of same child home sick from school

Child spends an extra 30 minutes in bed complaining about boredom
1 section of 3 of next week's English homework completed
1/2 session of Mathletics completed
Loooooong session on National Geographic kids games section
TV goes on at 11.00am, (Don't judge me: 3 back episodes of Planet Earth 2 watched - I call that a win, under the circumstances)
Conversation over lunch about... I can't remember.  Not sure it was intelligent.
Tantrum over uncharged iPod Touch
Mother's Tasks: Tactical 'forgetting' to recharge iPod Touch, wrangling with child over completion of further homework, complete failure to unload laundry from the machine, and dinner likely to consist of any old veg I can find to serve with chicken stir fry.  Writing: are you kidding?


Tasks likely to be completed if there is a Day 3 of having same child home sick from school

None - because it's not going to happen.

(Better not...)

Making the best of it...

Welcome to Snot Central.

The Boys and I are all recovering from fierce colds - again.

It drains you of enthusiasm, having a cold.  It particularly drains you of enthusiasm when one son appears in your bedroom at 3am crying from head pain due to backed up catarrh in his sinuses.  Throw a Husband travelling out of the country into the mix, along with wide-scale closures of the roads into the centre of Moscow (ruling out an easy drive to the only English-speaking clinic that you know will be open on what is actually a bank holiday) so that the tanks and hgv's showing off military hardware have an easy run for their parade down to and through Red Square, and you have a rather less cheerful Victory Day - today's holiday - than might otherwise have been the case in Potski Mansions.

We certainly didn't manage to make good our plan to go downtown to watch the parade on Tverskaya, much to Boy #2's disappointment.

But - this being Russia - Putin's brag-fest wasn't only visible on the ground.  All this plane obsessed boy - the one not suffering from head pains due to his cold - had to do...

was to go outside, and look up...

The one where it turns out I'm not so brave, after all...

I try to be a relaxed parent when it comes to matters of health for my sons, really I do.  Nobody wants to be that mother who flinches every time her child sniffs, or wraps them up in cotton wool every time they set foot outside the front door in case they encounter a normal childhood illness.  I believe whole-heartedly in letting your child's body develop without undue interference from antibiotics unless they're absolutely necessary*.

But once the Fear has had you in it's grasp, it never really lets go.

I still remember it all; the gut-wrenching dread that stalks your every waking moment when you have a seriously ill baby.  The feeling of helplessness as your 6 day-old child is prodded and poked, pricked and injected.  The constant watch to make sure that his Moro Reflex** doesn't knock the canula out, resulting in yet more harrowing attempts to insert a new one into his tiny arm.  The crushing, awful powerlessness of not being able to pick up my crying baby because doing so might interfere with the effect the lights are having on his bilirubin levels.

I remember the guilt; did I cause this?  Was it because I wasn't very good at breastfeeding?  Would he not have developed jaundice if I had had more milk?  Was the way the Scalded Skin Syndrome took such a fearsome hold a result of his lowered immune system because of the jaundice?  Did he catch the SSS when that none-too-clean looking orderly gave him a bath in the hospital when he was less than a day old and I could barely move from the bed due to the emergency c-section?  Should I have followed my instincts and grabbed him from her arms, ordered her away from the bed and refused to let go of him until, exhausted from lack of sleep on the too-noisy ward, we left 24 hours later?

Nearly seven years on those questions and many others from that time still haunt me.  Most of them I can discount in daylight hours when I am feeling relatively sensible. But one that won't go away and which I repeatedly ask myself (just like, I am sure, many expat parents living far from their comfort zone), is this:

How would I cope if an accident or a serious illness happened to my children here, now, in Moscow?

The answer is, I truly don't know.  Certainly there would be support structures I could call on; a Husband who speaks excellent Russian and who knows the right people to go to, or if he were travelling, friends who speak far better Russian than I do and who I know would go through hell and high water on my children's behalf.  Recent experiences within our social circle of excellent levels of care in both Russian and expat hospitals comfort me to some extent.  But say what you will about the UK NHS; it is still light years ahead of what the average Russian can expect to encounter in their nearest hospital.  And who knows, in an emergency,where you will end up?  It might well be the all mod-cons expat hospital in the centre of town.  But on the other hand, it might not.

So on evenings like tonight, when one son has a nasty cough and the other is complaining of stomach pain, I am rather more attentive than perhaps I might be if we were still living in London.  Logically I know that Boy #1's stomach pain is not possible appendicitis, but instead the result of too many sit-ups at his Taekwondo class this evening (stomach muscles are not our family's strong point; if I manage 10 I'm a mess and according to him, they did 200...), and that Boy #2 is not developing pneumonia but has just picked up one of the many colds doing the rounds at school at the moment.  Logically, I know both those things.

But logic doesn't stop me wanting to move my duvet to the floor of their bedroom tonight.

Turns out that the Fear - it never leaves you.


*although long term readers will know that I am fierce in my support of treating eczema proactively to prevent it developing into a long term issue or something more serious.

**also called the Startle Reflex

Just a small request...

In the last seven days I have...

• Unwittingly started a revolution in food safety procedures at our school's cafeteria. This was a direct result of giving one of my children a chocolate chip cookie purchased from there only to discover - via a race to the medical office where they hold our anti-histmanines and a thankfully still un-used eip-pen - that the chocolate chips were, in fact nuts. (The helpful member of staff responsible for making the cookies in the cafeteria kitchen decided to substitute the chocolate chips they had run out of with nuts - without actually telling anyone.)

• Collected the same child, on a different day, from school, to be warned by his teacher that she thought he was a little 'under the weather'. We got home, where he proceeded throw up spectacularly all over the kitchen floor. This did not phase me however, since I was just thanking my lucky stars that we had got out of the car 4 minutes earlier and he had taken his snow suit off 2 minutes earlier. Let's see; sick on the lino, or all over the inside of the car, my son, and his brother? Call me glass half-full, but I know which I prefer...

• Rushed to hospital with the other child (have you noticed how they hate to be upstaged by their siblings?) after he had a major collision while sledging on an ice run and needed 5 stitches just above one eye.

So, if anyone up there is listening, can we have a slightly calmer week this time around, please?

The Twelve Days of a Parent's Christmas

This post was inspired by Hot Cross Mum and Expat Mum, following a Twitter conversation about boys, loos, and needing to clean the bathroom floor more often than we might like. I'll leave you to join the dots together yourself on the subject... At any rate Hot Cross Mum took that start point and created her own version of 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' - and challenged us (in my 'oh, I'm not competitive at all' head, anyway) to do the same.

Obviously she's already mined the rich seam that is boys and the loo, so I was forced to look elsewhere - to something else that is currently at the forefront of my experience - and have re-written The Twelve Days of Christmas to a children's illness theme...

To be sung - in your head only, please - to the tune of The Twelve Days of Christmas...

On the first day of Christmas, my children gave to me: a headache and a high temperature.

On the second day of Christmas, my children gave to me; 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the third day of Christmas, my children gave to me; 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my children gave to me; 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my children gave to me: 5 broken nights.... 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the sixth day of Christmas my children gave to me: 6 concerned grandparent messages, 5 broken nights.... 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my children gave me to me; 7 hours internet shopping, 6 concerned grandparent messages, 5 broken nights.... 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the 8th day of Christmas, my children gave me to me; 8 days missed homework, 7 hours internet shopping, 6 concerned grandparent messages, 5 broken nights.... 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the 9th day of Christmas, my children gave to me; 9 doctor's notes, 8 days missed homework, 7 hours internet shopping, 6 concerned grandparent messages, 5 broken nights.... 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the 10th day of Christmas, my children gave to me; 10 messed up bedrooms, 9 doctor's notes, 8 days missed homework, 7 hours internet shopping, 6 concerned grandparent messages, 5 broken nights.... 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the 11th day of Christmas, my children gave to me; 11 sweaty pj's, 10 messed up bedrooms, 9 doctor's notes, 8 days missed homework, 7 hours internet shopping, 6 concerned grandparent messages, 5 broken nights.... 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

On the 12th day of Christmas, my children gave to me; 12 'I'm so boo-oo-red's, 11 sweaty pj's, 10 messed up bedrooms, 9 doctor's notes, 8 days missed homework, 7 hours internet shopping, 6 concerned grandparent messages, 5 broken nights.... 4 missed appointments, 3 hits of Calpol, 2 snotty tissues, and a headache and a high temperature.

Update:

Nappy Valley Girl has jumped on board with this one too - click here for a link - and so has Iota at Not Wrong Just Different. If you're inspired to do like wise, leave a comment telling me where to check and I'll add yours here too...