NotSheep

…and all through the house, people were starting to splutter and cough and shiver and get feverish and…well, three weeks of far too much to do, and far too little energy to do it, has meant blogging silence. Everyone got ill – some, like Freddy, seem to have got off fairly lightly, with only a day or two of feeling cruddy, while others, like Toby and me, hacked and spluttered our way through the three weeks surrounding Xmas and New Year. Such fun.

That’ll teach me to go up against the Blog Karma Beast.

On the Friday before Christmas, Jack’s friend A (girl, eight-going-on-forty) arrived with a little French dictionary because “I thought your boys might be able to use it when they’re doing their French” (she knows they do French, because she sat and watched them one day and I taught her the French numbers to ten). “This book,” she announced, “has five-oh-oh-oh words in it.” Jack looked at it. “Five thousand,” he said. “Oh,” said A, perfectly seriously, “will we count them?”

On the Saturday before Christmas, Barney went inner-tubing with GY. George missed this event because he, along with Freddy and Jack, had a ju-jitsu grading. They all arrived home about dinner-time, each with their next-belt-up.

By December 21st (Monday), half of us were feeling cruddy, but we struggled on…

On the evening of December 22nd, it was brought to my attention that Barney’s glasses frame was broken. They’d been broken since the weekend, but he hadn’t bothered saying. It was too late to get new lenses made before Christmas, so on Wednesday morning I phoned the optician to ask if they had another frame the same, so that we could put the old lenses into a new frame. They didn’t, but there was one at their head office – near the middle of the city, on one of the city’s busiest streets. And so December 23rd found me dragging my now-feeling-stinking-rotten body into the city centre, along with Louie (also feeling stinking-rotten) and Barney (not feeling so hot himself). Snow and ice all over the roads, traffic a mess – hours of queues coming out of the city while we were driving into it – wonderful. We finally made it home, via the local pharmacy to collect inhalers.

Oh yes, inhalers. I’d previously requested a prescription for inhalers for Jack – we already owned the chemist two, so I’d asked for three. The GP helpfully prescribed one, so I’d had to ring and request yet another prescription. It takes our GPs 48 hours to produce a prescription (yes, really) and then the pharmacy collects them at lunchtime and has them ready for collection late in the afternoon – which meant they’d be there by Wednesday evening. I hoped Jack’s last inhaler would hold out. By Wednesday morning, I phoned the GP again, to ask for an inhaler for myself. I think I’ve used an inhaler twice in the last twelve years, but things were getting bad. The receptionist declined to take my phone number, saying that the prescription request would be fine, and agreed to rush it so that it could be in the box for the pharmacy at lunchtime, to be collected along with Jack’s.

So we got to the pharmacy, which had collected Jack’s prescription and gave me his inhaler – but which had no prescription for me. I phoned the GP’s office again – it was closed. By this time I was feeling absolutely horrible, and was ready to cry. I went home to phone the out-of-hours GP to ask if they would phone in a prescription for me, but before I could get on the phone, it rang – a call from the family of the German boy that Freddy has been matched with in the exchange programme. They sound great, and seemed very open to the idea of home-education – asking lots of the questions I’d expect them to ask, given that it’s something with which they are completely unfamiliar. The boy and one of his parents (or maybe both? – I suppose I should find out!) are coming for a weekend later this month, so that everyone can get to know each other, and we’ll take it from there.

Anyway, back to the out-of-hours GP. The nurse who answered the phone said I might have pneumonia. I don’t, I said, I’ve had that and this isn’t it, all I need is an inhaler and a few days rest. But they refused to sort out an inhaler unless I was seen at Casualty first. Right. That would involve driving for over an hour (assuming the roads were clear and not icy), in freezing cold air, after 9 p.m., with a choice of taking a sick baby with me or leaving him to cry at home because it was evening and I wasn’t there, and with a choice of leaving a fifteen-year-old in charge of the other children so that Scratchy could drive me, or driving myself and stopping every 20 seconds to have a coughing fit. Not to mention the Xmas presents that still needed wrapping. Not happening this evening, I said, just no way. If you sort out an inhaler for me, I promise I’ll go in if I get any worse. No, they said, so I have struggled through without an inhaler. Useless, the lot of them.

On December 24th, I struggled out of bed to do my best to put together Christmas dinner – thankful that I’d done quite a bit of prep on the weekend, before I got to feeling dreadful. The turkey seemed to want to fight back, and as a result I sliced open the back of one finger before begging Freddy to do it – Barney was taking care of Louie, and George looked horrified at the thought of doing anything at all to a huge naked turkey. Freddy was willing – he got more butter and seasoning on himself than on the turkey, but it got done.

Dinner went reasonably well, considering most of us were sick and some of us were just hanging in there until we could fall over. Afterwards we started getting children into bed, although I’m sure that would have taken less time if George and Freddy hadn’t been leaping around the landing singing at the tops of their voices (”Jingle Bells, Batman smells…”) Eventually everyone was in bed and the little ones were asleep, and the bigger ones were able to get back up and become Santa’s Not-So-Little Helpers.

Our tradition has been that when a child gets too old to, erm, be a believer, we have explained that the whole Santa thing is a game, that it’s fun to play, and that now they are older, they can play it from the other side, in the grown-up way, by being in on the secret and the preparations. And once the little ones are asleep on Christmas Eve, the older ones get up and help us put the gifts under the tree, before going off to bed themselves. The gifts are wrapped, so they don’t know what’s in the packages – at least, each of them doesn’t know what’s in his own packages, although quite likely some of them will have helped me wrap the gifts for the others – and it all adds to their excitement. This year there were three helpers for Santa, and it made for a very efficient gifts-under-tree process

And then it was final snacks and drinks and everyone off to bed…and I started filling stockings. A few minutes later, Jack wandered in looking for his inhaler, but fortunately too bleary-eyed to notice the stocking contents-to-be strewn across my bed. He got packed back off to his own room – then a few minutes later, Toby also wandered in, also only half-awake. He too was ushered back to his own bed. Sheesh.

Coming up…Christmas Day.