I’ve not long been up; the children woke at a respectable seven thirty but poor Gav. I could tell from the ‘your go’ nudge and the empty bottles that he must have made a few trips in the night again. I’m giving him a lie-in to catch up. Milk has been distributed and the next mission is to dress everyone, as it’s quite nippy this morning. It was blazingly hot yesterday afternoon so it’s hard to tell quite what is going to happen today. I have to admit that I’m quite pleased it looks a little glum at the moment because there will be a little less pressure to dive out and I may get a turn at lying in too.
I haven’t had much chance to colour in my accounts in the last week. I feel a little more relaxed about adding a few words this morning between children as I managed to get a stack of Ebay clobber up last night so a few pennies will be coming in. Work managed not to pay me for one day last month, which knocked the balance a bit. Thankfully I had the proof that I was there because they still haven’t sorted me out a log-on so I’ve been sending all my internal mail from my hotmail account.
The big news from this morning is that Cara now has the chicken pox. I thought that she was about to pop the spots after her fevers the night before last. It followed the same pattern as Zadie’s. Yesterday she was off school and spent the day organising me and had no fevers at all. I almost regretted keeping her off! By the evening the fevers had started again and she chilled out enormously, which was a relief. We all sat down together to play Zelda. The girls love Zelda and only play the minimal part of helping me to puzzle solve and pressing the green button to open treasure chests. The tricky part of yesterday was getting Zadie to and from school with Cara in tow. I didn’t want Zadie to miss school and as most of her preschool have had the chicken pox in this round I decided that the best that I could do would be to take Cara along but to set her well back from the other children. It was fine apart from the fact that the most garrulous mother decided to chat to me from the opposite end of the room. While we were talking several other parents came in and I felt more than a little embarrassed holding a conversation about why my daughter was off school, in a place where she was likely to spread her illness! The other mum pointed out sagely that the chicken pox is most contagious before the spots appear. Oh dear! Still I did manage to keep Cara well back so her contact with other children was from a good distance.
Thomas and Cerys have yet to catch the chicken pox and I’m now ditching my hopes that they don’t get it when in nappies. It’s obvious that they will so I’m hoping that it’s sooner rather than later. I don’t want to be stressing about it happening next month with holiday looming. At least it’s over with then. Zadie is well over it and her spots are healing marvellously. She’s quite jealous of the fact that the attention has diverted from her illness and keeps claiming to feel hot and talks proudly about how she still has spots. Quite comical really!
The twins are going through that super-powered develop-by-the-day stage where they surprise you every day with what they come out with. Cerys’s favourite thing to say is,‘ha ha, i’s bunnnnnnn’ while she puts on a slightly dorky face when she finds something amusing. She is stringing sentences together now and when she can’t find the words she makes them up, usually when she’s telling Thomas not to do something but she often pulls at my trouser leg and when I drop to my knees she’ll roar with laughter and tell me about something that has happened in complete babble with one or two words she knows thrown in. Thomas isn’t stringing words together yet but he’s beginning to master words very well. His favourite words are ‘nana for any kind of fruit and ‘oo’bor’ for football for any kind of ball and indeed anything remotely resembling something spherical. He says ‘hi’ya’ brightly, in favour of Cerys’s now very posh ‘hello’. The other thing that Thomas has mastered is hitting. The last couple of weeks he has been really going at the boy thing of using every thing that he gets into his chubby mitts as a potential weapon. I now have to look not only at the potential choking hazard of toys but also at their weight and sharp edges! It’s an enormous change from the little Thomas of a couple of months ago who was a complete pushover and had everything taken off him. Cerys still nips in to grab things she wants but these days Thomas toddles after her in his slightly bent-legged way with his arms outstretched like Frankenstein. Cerys will howl and hold her trophy close to her chest and there will be a brief Mexican stand-off before Thomas gives her a good biff. Cerys has another role though. If Thomas gets upset she’ll dive in and say ‘s alrii’ Tayo’ patting him on the shoulder. That usually results in her being biffed too because he can’t stand sympathy when he’s upset. She has decided that taking things to Thomas is her job and when I make a round of drinks she’ll always take Thomas’s to him. He has cottoned on already that he quite likes having things fetched for him. When he’s a bit more mobile I’ll have to get him to do the same back or I’ll have a very pampered young man on my hands.
Right, time to zip. Between sentences I’ve had to fetch drinks, fruit, breakfast, clothes and now I have to run the bath for the babies. The girls are happily playing Mario Kart together. Gav is still asleep. Thomas just walked in saying ‘baaaall’ and grinned broadly as I played a brief game of catch with him. Catch involved holding the ball up dramatically in a throwing position then slamming it into my hand! He is now pushing a toy car around the floor.
