Bodily collapse

Date: 9:12am, 17 Mar 2010

I think my body may be falling apart. The top of my legs is aching and I feel like an OAP on the walk into school. On Thursdays and Fridays when I walk to work it now takes me twice as long. I actually congratulated myself last week for lapping a pensioner and then she overtook me on the home straight. It takes me around 10 minutes to get up from the sofa, usually because I have to step over children. Ditto the bed. And on Monday I sustained a guinea pig-related injury which led to a night of endless awakenings. I think I must have got some hay stuck under my finger nail when I was cleaning out "the beasts" [as my partner refers to them]. By the end of the day the whole finger had swollen and gone alternately yellow and red. I have been waking up a lot in the night anyway, but on Monday night I woke every hour or so with the finger throbbing away and thoughts of rushing into A & E at dawn passing through my head [I reckoned I didn't have time to go to the GP during daytime hours and what could they give me anyway if it was infected?]. I was willing to have the whole thing chopped off by 3am. Luckily, my partner is a first aid expert, although I am a very bad patient. He lanced the finger the next morning just as I was having visions of never being able to type again and bandaged it up.

Besides the physical collapse, I also went through a very grumpy phase circa 4pm on Monday. This was 1) because I only got the link to the Government's announcement on flexible working at 2.55pm so was late for the school run then had to spend the 40 minutes after the school run sending out statements plus fielding demands for ham sandwiches and flour and water paste and 2) because bonkers daughter refused to let her sister use her scooter although she had earlier promised to do so. This made us horribly late for picking up rebel daughter from football. I was also very tired from bending down to pick up all the flour and water induced mess since getting up from bending down takes around 10 minutes each time. The long and short of it is that I lost my rag right in front of the neighbour and I didn't have the energy to even cover it up. We were, naturally, late for rebel daughter, who had won the football championship but was in a strop because she had only played in three of the games, and therefore late for big girl daughter's ballet. I spent ballet moaning to a friend who had had a similar day, but without the bending down problems. I then, of course, had to go and apologise to the neighbour the next day before dealing with yet another childcare emergency because the friend who was going to pick up the girls on Thursday has had her house hit by a particularly virulent version of the chicken pox. Big girl daughter is also feeling rather ill. Despite all this, work goes on as normal. In fact, I think that, without such challenges, it would be all a bit too much like a stroll in the park.

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Related tags: Pregnancy