Work or Vomit?

Pudding has been sick, on occasion copiously, five times in the last 24 hours. In bed at 6am yesterday, just I was heading out on my latest Wheatear hunt. Then, highly inconveniently, at about 8:20am yesterday, just as we were gathering ourselves for the school run. That was the BIG one, and of course she was sitting on her freshly-made bed, with the sheets from the previous one still going round in the machine...  At 9.15am, in the car on the way back from a very fraught school run she was sick for the third time. Ok, so fairly used to it now, commando roll out of the car and so on, but the car is brand new. On Tuesday afternoon I had handed back the old one, which incidentally smelled of vomit from a previous splurge, and was enjoying a pristine, new-car-smelling car. It made it to about 36 hours old, with about 25 miles on the clock before it was christened. You could see it coming frankly. This one required the shower to restore the child to a clean condition.

That was it for the rest of the day, but there were several false alarms, and lots of scurrying with towels. And of course a tremendous amount of washing. By the afternoon she seemed herself again, and I tentatively tried a slice of plain toast. This stayed down, and so we progressed to plain rice for dinner. She ate the lot, seemed fairly chirply still, so we put her to bed with high hopes. Hopes that were to be dashed just before midnight. Mrs L dealt with Pudding, I put the sheets on to wash.

The time: 3am. The place: her bed, obviously. Apparently I was unwakeable, so I only learned about this in the morning. But it must be true as I am currently washing yet another sheet. There is something special about needing to unload a washing machine full of child bedding in order to fill it again with the vomit-covered bedding that you had unloaded from that very machine only the previous afternoon....

I am sick of sick. The smell of sick. The sight of sick. I'm sure she is too. Of all the things that children can get - and believe me when I say they can get a lot - stomach bugs rank as my least favourite. I would, I think - but I am still not quite sure - rather be at work. So far today, no more though. We survived the school run, with Pudding wrapped tightly in a towel. A big thank you to Adam's mummy and Sophie's mummy whom we fortunately met outside the school gates and who took the other two in. We are not sure what disease she has, but so far none of the rest of us seem affected. I am spraying anti-bacterial stuff with abandon, and washing my hands about once every three minutes in scenes reminiscent of Macbeth. Meanwhile Pudding is watching Angelina Ballerina for the twenty-seventh time in three days. There are times when I really love that mouse. She seems not to tire of it, and this means she stays put. I can thus create a vomit-zone that should hopefully limit any damage and mean that I don't have to wash the sheets again until tonight.