Night out

Date: 8:14am, 28 Nov 2011

The weekend had looked fairly promising from a distance. My partner and I were at last going to go out and spend the Pizza Express voucher we had been given as a wedding present. My mum had volunteered to babysit. We were anticipating some quality child-free time where we could actually find out what we have individually been up to in the last year since most of our conversations are reduced to grunts. However...The baby decided that this week he was going to up the ante. He has started climbing everywhere and doing quite a few tantrum-ettes where he puts his head on his chest and then rolls up in a ball of frustration until someone figures out what on earth he wants [he, of course, doesn't know]. He woke up at circa 4am on Saturday. He did try to go back to sleep for around three hours and possibly got 10 minutes here and there.

I tried to look on this in a positive way because the Virgin Media man was due at 8am, having cancelled twice. Our BBC 3 Channel and others [including Disney Channel - hurray] have been sticking for weeks which makes watching the Eastenders catch-up programme at 10pm slightly more of a challenge than normal. The Virgin man arrived. He looked young and fresh faced. He was then subjected to the kittens investigating his toolkit, the baby investigating his toolkit, daughter three asking questions about her maths homework and daughter two parading various outfits for the day ahead. "Do you have children?" I inquired. "No," he said with the look of someone who was thanking his lucky stars. He fixed the telly, though. Things were looking up.

We did a one-hour tour de force shopping session for around 15 relatives' Christmas presents and dropped daughter one at a party. We retired home and daughters two and three suggested a makeover session for the evening ahead. "What exactly are you putting on my face?" I asked daughter two as she set to work. "It's just a bit of pink chalk," she said. "I think you look a bit pale." Several other suspicious substances were ladled on my face. My partner remarked that I looked "very Essex".

We headed out when my mum arrived to babysit. The pub and Pizza Express seemed half full, a sign of the times. I rang my mum to check that daughter one had arrived home safely from the party. She put daughter one on the line to me. Apparently, she had been to see Twilight and had had chest pains, felt sick, stumbled to the cinema toilet, felt dizzy, hit her head on the wall, collapsed, blacked out, got up and felt sick, wobbled over to a cinema poster, been sick and felt she was having an out of body experience. Nothing too dramatic then! She had an on and off headache and felt a bit sick. We headed home. I looked up her symptoms, thinking it could be a virus. I was directed to NHS Direct and rang them. They told me to take her to A & E immediately.

So off I headed with daughter one, leaving the baby with my partner in the sure and safe knowledge that he would howl down the house as soon as he inevitably woke up. Four hours later and after several tests and her throwing up again we emerged with a diagnosis of a return of her migraine attacks in a new and slightly more worrying form. We got home around 4am and the baby woke up about 20 minutes later. By 7.30 he was up for good and speeding down the hallway to wake up his sisters. I pounced on him and dragged him into daughter two's room who was complaining that she felt scared. "What are you scared of?" I asked. "Everything," she said. Mainly, however, it is that the house will be flooded and/or burn down. Daughter one went through a similar fear of fires after the school fire safety demonstration. What on earth do they tell them????

I flaked out around 9am and my partner, who had also not slept well, took up the baton. Daughters two and three made cards and gifts for their big sister and placed them round her bed for when she woke up. The baby sobbed. All in all, not the peaceful weekend we had been anticipating.

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Related tags: Hospital