storbarnsförälder

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I think we need to work on this presents thing. More organised opening; I mean, the number isn't likely to decrease in future years, and it will be a while before they can handle this kind of volume without going a bit mad. Rob and I both have an urge to buy them everything in the whole world, which we resist, but they still end up with too darn much. I will have to cull this week, gradually, and buy more storage boxes so that things can be sorted like with like. The dressing up box is full. The jigsaw box is quite full enough, though not overflowing as yet. We have no decent place for doll accessories, a category I hadn't even considered.

Ah well. Storage is fun. It's almost as much fun as stationery.

Emer has a bruise on her arm, two semi-circles where Linnea bit her. Yesterday it was pink, today it is blackening. And when I stroke and kiss it, I am shocked that I can't feel the pain of it - it hurts to look at it, so that it's ridiculous that it doesn't hurt to touch.

"There was food in the kitchen of our rocket, and there was plates, and a table, and a bathroom, and a other room, and a dining room. Oh no! You agotten your space boots! There! Now, Emer's space boots. There! There. That's a only thing for a frog."

Linnea is eating her very first bread. I did the weighing, she mixed and kneaded and shaped, I put the oven on and put it in. It's a bit dark - it didn't prove long enough and so didn't rise and is dark-crusted and dense - but it tastes wonderful.

I wonder will we leave any for Daddy?

I got easily eight hours' sleep last night. I had three Weetabix for breakfast, Emer napped for 90 minutes, I got Emer's and Linnea's clothes sorted out - in the right places in the drawers and wardrobe, sorted out the confusion between which child wears which clothes, etc - and got a load of laundry on. Rob hung the sheets on the line outside.

Moving back into my home after two months of not really being present even if I was technically here is peculiar. I went into hospital with the virus on 5th January. Today I discovered that the steel wool balls that stop scale building up in the kettle have vanished. Yesterday I found the cafetiere with the teabags, not the coffee (which reminds me that I can use it to make looseleaf tea; must try that).

Yesterday Emer discovedred Kleenex. It just keeps coming! Yay! Uhoh, Kleenex machine is broken. Turn it over and bash it. Uhoh, still broken. Maaaaammmmmeeeeeeee!

Backwards, crawl backwards, oh child on the floor - crosser and crosser, she crosses the floor.

Emer is on antibiotics and an inhaler. This is because she coughed up lumps of green ick. This is the third antibiotic she's on. The first one was ok; 1.5ml three times a day, white, sweetish-smelling. Didn't quite kick the infection, so we got a larger dose of the same antibiotic - but we filled the prescription at a different pharmacy, so it was a different brand, and this was yellow, foul-smelling, 2.5ml three times a day.

Two days later I went back to the doctor and said "I can't get it in to her. She took the white one, won't take this one, and is now fighting anything we try to put in or near her mouth except me." So we were given a different one, 1.5ml twice a day.

Tomorrow morning is her very last dose of it. The infection appears to be gone. She's still lost trust in my ability ot put things in her mouth, though. That's gone for now.

Then there's the inhaler, for the bronchiolitis. It's a little canister in an l-shaped delivery spray thingie, like all the asthmatics I went to school had, either secretly or openly depending on social requirements at the time (get off dusting or hoovering the classroom - wave inhaler. Get invited to join the smokers behind the school - hide inhaler). Since she's an infant, she can't inhale the spray at the instant it's dispensed, so she needs a spacer, a little tube to hold the noxious fumes in while she breathes in and out a few times to absorb them.

A spacer and mask for an infant costs about 38 Euros. So the GP told me to use a paper cup wiv a hole in. So that's what we've been doing.

Emer loves to play with the paper cups; she chews them, looks through the hole, bashes them on things - and when we approach with the inhaler fitted in it, she fights. When it's clamped over her nose and mouth and squeezed to make it puff, she actually holds her breath. She goes red, inhales deeply, gets a lungful of atropine, cries, inhales some more - after three good inhales or twenty seconds we give up and comfort her.

Poor baba. To deliver this stuff we now have to pin both her arms down and immobilise her head, hold her nose to get her mouth open, and stroke her throat to get her to swallow, and clamp a cup over her face until she breathes enough. It's brutal.

After tomorrow, I'm going to try using the inhaler as-needed instead of regularly. Just to see how she is. At least there's no more liquid medicine to go in.

Poor, poor baba.