Having a bad day

Only son has had the norovirus over the weekend. He charged into our room at 7am on Saturday, jumped into bed and 10 minutes later announced “I feel a bit sick. Get the bucket.” Oh dear. About 45 minutes later he was sick for a second time. I heard the click of daughter two’s door. Daughter two lives in terror of the norovirus. She wasn’t coming out of that room for the rest of the day, except with a scarf wrapped firmly around her mouth. Only son is a great patient. “You smell of vanilla,” he said about a minute after throwing up. He is appreciative and full of compliments even in illness.

Daughter three loomed. She saw the bucket. “Is he sick?” she asked and went downstairs fast. She spent the day doing something secretive in her room. It turns out that she was making some sort of waterproof tail attachment for her mermaid outfit. It is a tail-shaped object with flip-flops attached with tape and it fits inside the mermaid costume, enabling her to hop around the house in the mermaid outfit and lie on the floor, sofa or bed in full mermaid mode.

Art marathon

Daughter one was on an art marathon. She is a bit behind in her art GCSE and the exam is this week. Her teacher rang last week to say she had to do 80 hours worth of work in a week. Daughter one has risen to the challenge. Let’s hope she doesn’t get the norovirus before she reaches the exam.

My partner stayed home with only son and the bucket while I went out with some of the team to address all the stuff that broke last week. The trouble with weekends is that they are mainly spent gearing up to the week ahead. I took the laptop to PC World – their wondrous insurance policy is still working. I keep fearing that there will be a limit on the number of times you can get your laptop fixed and that we will most certainly have passed it. We got the oven from the same place so I raised the ongoing issue of the broken knob. “They say a spare part may not be here till mid-April,” I said. The PC World woman went to work and eventually came up with a solution – a new oven is on its way later this week.

As I left the shop a man asked for how I rated the assistance I had had. I punched the top rating. If there could have been an extra commendation I would have awarded it. That was two broken things off my list. I took daughter two’s broken bed to the dump. She has decided to sleep on a bunch of mattresses in the style of princess and the pea, but did not want to come out of her room to dispatch her old bed frame in case she came too close to only son’s bucket. On the way back we noticed that the motorway is closed at some point next week. The sign was on the roundabout so we couldn’t stop to check when. I have to use the motorway next week. Uh oh.

The road to the secondary school is also closed, putting paid to our finely constructed schedule. Every week there is a different logistical puzzle to solve. Added to this week’s challenges is the fact that the car is in for its MOT, my partner is off to Spain on Thursday and my mum is away. If we actually get to Friday we’ll be doing well. Instead of going round and round the roundabout to check timings, I told the team that there must be a motorway information site on the web so we headed home.

We went into the house to find the cat had thrown up its worm medicine in the garden. My partner announced that he felt a bit queasy. Only son had rallied a bit, announced an immense hunger, eaten one bit of toast and been dramatically sick. “I think I’m having a bad day,” he said in typical philosophical fashion.

*Mum on the run is Mandy Garner, editor of Workingmums.co.uk.

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