You never interview before becoming a parent. Sure, in most cases, when you hear of the dead beat parents out their that should do better by their kids, you think to yourself “Maybe you should have to interview before becoming a parent.”. After all you don’t need a lot in the way of qualifications to be a parent (regardless of how the kids appear in your life) but you do need to be capable to ‘parent’ once you take on the responsibility of tiny little lives.
As usual, pestilence and plague have landed in our house and it is doing the rounds between the four of us. As even more usual, Nugget is the one worst hit with it all. With her bronchomalacia any sort of cold, flu, sneeze, basically becomes a hundred times worse. We get her over the first illness, but then she develops this horrible whore of a cough that we can’t get rid of. She has inhalers, we get steroids to help her, but effectively we have to ride it out. Which is grand and all, except she coughs so much she will get sick, her throat becomes a war ground of pain and she barely sleeps.
And as any parent knows, when your kids don’t sleep you don’t sleep either.
Over the years we’ve investigated and tried various things to try and sort it out for her sooner, but nothing seems to work. We have some tricks that help alleviate the problem, but nothing that resolves the cough so she is back to fighting form. It is one of the downsides of having a great creche. Nugget loves going to creche to see the staff and her friends, a fairly ringing indictment that the creche is doing a fantastic job if the kids can’t wait to go there. But if some kid brings anything at all in we are at Def Con Cough in the house because it is a waiting game for Nugget to catch the bug, then have her cough flare up.
It’s a pain in the ass.
As she is in the middle of a cough bout right now, we’re doing the usual. Meds, fluids, sacrifices to long forgotten gods for better health. Nothing is working, as usual. The poor girl is exhausted. In order to get her to sleep we put her in the parental bed and opened the window.
Cold air helps. I guess it helps with the throat and cause less irritants or something. I dunno, I’m not a doctor. All I know is it works and she can get over. The only problem is that it means she cannot sleep in her own bed as she currently shares a room with her little brother. We don’t want him getting a cold, because that’s just shooting ourselves in the foot. We’d no doubt just get her sorted and next thing he is down with a cold and we are playing countdown again.
Typically when we do this cold air trick it isn’t that big a deal, one of us sleeps with her and the other sleeps in the spare room. But we had guests over during this session so the spare room was gone.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” I said, getting a spare blanket from the hotpress.
“No, I will,” herself says.
I smile.
“I’ve a bad back and an ability to sleep anywhere, the floor is grand. You won’t be able to sleep on the floor then I will have to listen to you complain about being tired the next day.”
This is met with a dirty look and a slap to the head with a pillow. Uncalled for, maybe, but it is an indication that we haven’t reached breaking point yet if we can joke like this.
“Get into the bed beside us,” herself says. “The bed is big enough.”
It’s true. Recently the CEO of the Marriage informed the CFO that a new bed was required. Apparently a double bed just isn’t big enough, you need a Gaza strip between the sheets to allow for wedded bliss sometimes. I look over at the starfish child that is taking up two thirds of the bed and shake my head.
I don’t want to risk waking her. She has been asleep for about two hours now, cold air clearly helping, and if I get in there will be mattress earthquakes that will disturb her from much needed slumber. The ladyfriend weighs about the same as an angel’s feather, so she is the better option to get into bed.
I take a spare pillow and toss it down on the ground beside the bed. I lie down, sausage rolling in the duvet since I don’t have to share for a change, and take up my place at the foot of the bed like a giant deformed guard dog. Herself stands near my head, looking down at me.
“You’re serious?” she asks.
I’m not sure why, we’re together long enough for her to know just how stubborn I can get. Particularly when I want to ensure my sick family members are comfortable.
“Go on,” I said, snuggling into the pillow and finding the floor strangely comfortable. “It’s grand, honest. Sure it’s part of the job.”
A job that I wouldn’t change for the world, although the terms and condition around sick periods could be improved a bit if possible.
Parenting Pobal 