14th April 2010 (Wednesday)

A break in the narrative! Apologies to those who actually read this regularly – partly due to lack of interesting things to impart and partly due to getting back a bit late last night and being rather tired. Not very late but you know.


As the Littles has been ill, for Monday we just kept quiet at home. Despite promising signs on Sunday, it was dragging on a bit. Didn't do much, stayed at home, entertained her quietly, dealt with squits. Tuesday (yesterday) despite looking up quite nicely in the evening there was a temperature again in the morning, and then up and down throughout the day, mainly OK and pretty perky (despite continued squits) but generally dragging on a bit now so by midday when she took another hike in body temp regulation decided to get her checked out by a doc, just in case – been a while by then. So, as we're not registered anywhere started calling up my list of docs that the school gave me – but no appointments to be had anywhere the same day (unless we went to a waiting-a-long-time sort of place) and they all advised me to wait until 5:45 and call the out of hours GP line. So we did – besides, by that time she had perked up anyway. Having contacted them at the said time, we were given an appointment at 6:30 – not bad really. So we went. And they checked her over, had a look, poked a bit, and said well it's OK not too bad but just in case go and get some samples done. The only place that could do this was the (rather dramatically) A&E – so off we went – and sat there in the admissions with other variously non-A&E looking customers, all quite smiley and happy looking. The most discomfiting thing was that we'd come out without having dinner – we were starving (but that's no big deal) but even the Non was saying she was hungry so I found the only vending machine around and got some hugely unhealthy crisps (they seemed to be ExtrA loaded with sodium just because they were on sale in a hospital – I guess they reckoned that if you had a heart attack on the spot you didn't have far to go) but just as we were about to give them to the Littles they said 'Oh no, not before she's been seen' – usual hospital starvation thing, we all know it well but seems a bit harsh when imposed on a 5 year old. Still, the crisps were at least not much to be missed, as we discovered only later. Anyway, we waited, and hung about, and waited, and had temperature checked, were ushered to wait in a bed (at least that was something, Littles fell asleep and I think I did too – no, not crawling in the bed, just the chair) – and finally there was nothing much more done than a bit of poking and prodding (they did give her a bit of paracetamol, just because I'd purposefully not given her stuff in case they wanted to do something else) but in short we were sent home thankfully by about 10 p.m., and very glad of it. However, should it all by some means not clear up in the next couple of days, we've got samples galore wafting about Newcastle which will be busy being examined and assessed (rather them than me, I can tell you) so all that's in the pipeline as a backup. I reckon it was worth going and having a tedious time just to be certain.

In any case, today she's been much better, and although I haven't been checking her temp it's because there's been no need – she's been OK. Rather pale and hollow by now, it's been a few days and small reserves deplete quickly, naturally. Squits still continue but by this afternoon less frequent, at least- and not hot. Not falling asleep in the middle of the day, and indeed, bouncing on the bed and jumping off the sofa pretending to dive into the water in her new wetsuit, which just arrived. I have to say, I'm utterly thrilled with this item, and so is she. It fits absolutely perfectly, she loves the colour, she loves the feel (I think she must have been a bit jealous of mine although she didn't say anything – was very receptive to the whole idea of it being 'tight' and clingy which she would normally abhor, easily accepted the fact that it has to be tight or it won't keep you warm and it'll always be a little hard to put on), and in general it's a huge success. Can't wait to try it out. The only thing she's still kicking up a fuss at is eating. As we know, no eat, no strength. Yesterday she survived on one piece of toast and a very small amount of plain pasta the whole day. Today she was still pulling the same faces so I just explained to her that no eat, no strength, it's the same for everybody, and there's nothing I can do to make her better if she doesn't eat, it's her choice. So took away her lunch and did something else for a couple of hours (she'd already taken an hour to eat not-quite-a-slice of toast in the morning). Re-offered after a couple of hours, and it went down relatively nicely. Bit of a problem again at dinner (getting tired of course by then and besides there's the distraction of Daddy being there, and no opportunity to set it by for hours on end as it's late) but eventually got there. I think especially with the childhood I had, I don't want her to think that she's not in charge of or responsible for her own body – even though she does seem to be entirely inclined to wish to think otherwise. I know it's a difficult time with no appetite, but actually I think it does seem to be finally seeping through.

Talking of which, one little incident today on the 'learning' scale... As those us us who know her are entirely aware, never has there been a child more inclined to pretend not to understand, not hear, not absorb information from others that Hers Truly. Even the kids at school have figured this out (they're no fools) – I noticed Sophie who sits opposite her, and who's very sensible (apropos of what I forget) saying something and then looking at her sternly and wagging her finger and saying 'but she DOESN'T LISTEN') – at which the Non snickered quietly in assent. Well it's much better than thinking she can't do things – almost half way through breaking through the barrier, really. If you've got an open secret that you're bone-idle it's almost on the way to industry. Anyway, one of the things she doesn't like doing is turning clothes the right way out (even a sock) and putting them on. Reckons it's all just beyond her, and not to be tampered with, better scream and throw a tantrum than to listen to anything anyone's trying to explain to you. Today I told her to put a pair of trousers on that she'd discarded last night inside out. Usual initial reaction. However by some fluke, managed to get her to LOOK and imitate the actions of turning a leg the right side out. Said I would do one leg and she could do the other. First time it didn't work, she flickered a glance but didn't really take it in. Tried again, and this time she (by some divine intervention) decided to carry out the instructions given. Suddenly she was faced with a pair of trousers miraculously the right way out. Utterly astounded by this magical occurrence, she immediately jumped up and threw her arms around me in an expression of gratitude. On being asked how it felt to be able to do it herself she came out with 'very good!' - and then being reminded of the ultimate objective of putting the trousers on jumped up and was more than eager to surmount on her own account that other hurdle, turning them the right way up and round back to front (many's the time she's willfully jammed two feet upside down into the bottom of a trouser leg and refused to listen to anything at all, preferring to go nude in the cold rather than accept that there's a waist end and a foot end, and never the two shall be the same). Slowly slowly, one step at a time. There really are a pitifully small number of processes we need to learn to survive and cope in life, and once they're learned, they're not a problem.

Another one talking of learning, thought it was a bit of a milestone today. Being convalescent, in the morning we retired until nearly 11 a.m. to Mummy and Daddy's bed to read books. Now, I had a particularly good book that was coming to a bit of a climax ('The Dante Club', recommend if anyone hasn't read it and if they have, this is precisely the sort of detective story I would be proud of writing – a good bit of erudition but doesn't rely on slavish scholarliness to understand, page-turning but well written and planned out, good engagement tactics throughout, and some individual absolutely brilliant passages, not a frequent occurrence at all in literature) so I didn't read her books with her. She had a new-ish batch of library books to go through, so I picked one and said off you go. So she sat there and read through one. Now, when she read she read a loud, but I noticed with 'Koala Sees the World' that she was extrodinarily good at reading aloud and in character. The narrator is in her own voice, the Koala's is slightly high and innocent. The Lyrebird is piping and sing-song, the Diamond Python is not only quiet and hissing but slow in diction as well, and persuasive and mellow. Considering she's five, and she's never clapped eyes on the book before, and it's labelled (incongruously to my mind but there we go, it's not completely a baby-book) Reading Challenge years 3-4 (that's 4-5 years above her age) – that's not bad. She enjoyed that but I still hadn't finished my book, so she went on to Lauren Child's 'Beware of Storybook Wolves' (a fantastic book for anyone who has appropriate age children – actually I enjoyed reading it myself later so scrub that last qualification) and sat there rolling with laughter at it. (This one was labelled years 5-6). In particular favour was the Little Wolf's story-within-story 'blurb' of 'For a real thrill try reading the story of THE Little FIERCE WOLF AND THE THREE PINK PIGLETS. It will scare your socks off.' I think she must have never heard the 'socks off' figure of speech and it must have been particularly mentally vivid for her because she had to get up and go to the loo - I suspect because she was laughing too much at the thought of it. Anyway, the milestone I guess was that she was 'properly' reading the books, without any intervention, assistance, or encouragement, entirely for her own enjoyment – the which was apparently abundantly to be had. Now, having said that, I think we'll go over them tomorrow again together, and talk about them a bit, and do the usual comprehension questions and so on. Usually, a few words are new so there's a bit of vocab, I check out a few points of grammar by asking which pronouns refer to whom and so on, and then a bit of synopsis practice by asking for (well, mainly pointing out at this point but that's fine) a paraphrase of a couple of pages in a sentence. The latter is probably the hardest (actually I think a lot of adults find it hard so it's not surprising), the initial is simply learning, and the grammar I think it building up quite nicely – getting much better by the week, as far as I can tell. Just a bit of practice needed, a bit of attention to what's going on. She certainly has no trouble in doing the Year 2 Literacy worksheets I print off the net for her to do as her 'writing' practice. We hold back on that one these days considerably – mainly, we spend most of the time on easy maths repetition and memorising practice, but after all have to keep a hand in writing a few words, that's all. There's a bit of a funny effect going on with the very-much lower grade of writing required at school – she starts scrawling her letters and 'forgetting' how to write them when exposed to a lot of school work. However, for a start I know that this is the case with a lot of kids who are ahead of the class (no surprise if you think of the practicalities) and secondly it's simply HARD to write nice letters that big – she's used to writing small and it requires quite a lot of skill to craft nice big letters out of sync, as anyone who's had to write a poster or a banner at short notice and beheld the resulting scrawl with dismay will accurately know. However, like kids who speak dialect at school and 'proper' at home seamlessly (or vice versa), it's not a problem to switch back and forth so I'm not bothered.

Goodness. What a long blabber. I guess I've been spending all of my day with the Littles so that's all I'm thinking about. There's probably other stuff I was meant to talk about but this is way too long, I'll cut it short and leave it as a steaming heap of child-information you never wanted to know about. Apologies to any readers but as I also want to keep this as a diary-record actually I'm not too focused on audience retention – sorry. Ah, one day when she's rich and famous everone'll be interested, you'll see. Bah, pity that by that time I'll probably have lost all trace of this record – did I tell you I can't find any backups (indeed any originals – digitally) of any of my writing? Luckily I still hold out hope that it'll be lurking somewhere in the undelved boxes... but that's not at all certain. Still, you know. What's the odd novel or so, I've still got a print-out, doesn't matter ultimately but it does take a devil of a time to type out again. We'll see.

Lots of love to all, V xxxxx