Having laughed heartily at the misfortunes of Number One Daughter earlier this week, because of Ritalin Boy having contracted an unpleasant vomiting bug, this morning the joke was on me.
We were woken at around three this morning by Oliver standing next to our bed, telling us that he thought he wasn’t very well.
He wanted to come in bed with us.
Mindful of Ritalin Boy’s hilarious performance, having vomited in every bed in their house, I can tell you that I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect. Of course I wouldn’t have dreamt of saying so, and he came and settled sadly down in between us. After that I spent the rest of the night clinging precariously to the edge of the bed and hoping not to hear the sort of noises that preclude a small child starting to think about vomiting.
We thought later that it might well turn out to be the very last time we had a child spending the night in our bed, because they are all getting big now, even Ritalin Boy. I might well have experienced the end of an era in my life this very day.
Not that they don’t all get in our bed anyway, we have woken up before now to find Number One Daughter, Number One Son-In-Law and Ritalin Boy all leaping energetically on to the end of the bed. Lucy didn’t have a bed of her own at all until she was four.
Anyway, fortunately Oliver wasn’t sick, and at half past seven Number One Daughter phoned to say that Ritalin Boy’s ailment had metaphorphosised into an explosive pooing misfortune, and I was able to laugh again.
After that Oliver was sick after all, which was probably karmic, and developed a high temperature, so I filled him full of drugs and stuck him back in his own bed with Hitch Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy on a CD and hoped that he would go to sleep.
We were up then, so we got on with packing for our imminent adventure. We are not going until Sunday but we have got to work both tonight and on Saturday, so I wanted to get everything done properly in advance. In this way, on Sunday we can just get out of bed and go, instead of messing about at home for most of the day, getting crosser and crosser and running up and down the stairs trying to remember things like socks and phone chargers.
I discovered to my enormous happiness that last summer when I bought Oliver’s school trousers I had thoughtfully bought a couple of identical pairs in a different colour and hung them up with his shirts in generous preparation for this very moment. This meant that all of my usual seasonal concerns about Oliver’s leg-wear simply evaporated. I had forgotten that I had done this until the moment I found them, and then I remembered that it had been a present that my summertime self had helpfully left for the future me, what a kindly soul I must have been.
This made the whole job loads easier, instead of desparately obliging him to try on endless pairs of last year’s outgrown trousers I had a neat row of smart tidy trousers hung up with matching shirts.
After that it was a breeze. Lucy packed her own things, and Mark sat on the bed whilst I packed ours, recommending some shirts and rejecting others. This made it astonishingly quick, and before I knew it we were done, and there was a tidy, if enormous, stack of luggage in the hall next to the front door. We are only going for three nights, and I have known people backpack around the world with far less, but I really don’t care in the least. I have taken all my very nicest clothes and will wear them one after the other and feel as though I am beautiful. This illusion is helped along by enthusiastic alcohol consumption.
After that there were all the usual day things to be done, like the washing and emptying the dogs, and there was a great deal more ironing. Mark kindly cleaned the bathroom, which he does well because of not needing to stand on a chair to get to the top of the mirror and the shower, and I wrapped the last of the outgoing Christmas presents.
It is a funny anxious thing to be doing, to give people things that you have made yourself, a bit like being six again. In my case I do not seem to have developed much manual dexterity in the intervening period.
I wrapped and stuck and tied ribbons, and Mark had had to dash out to the post office for extra supplies of brown paper and sticky tape before it was all done, but of course in the end we had finished.
It took both of us to carry everything over to the post office, but once it had gone we felt very pleased with the world, brilliant to have sent things off to distant places so that people will know we are thinking of them.
When we got back our own post had been delivered, and there were Christmas cards, which gave me the exact same happy feeling I had been hoping to send out. Amongst them was a letter from my aunt which I read to Mark over a pot of tea, telling me all about the things her own parents used to do at Christmas, which was so lovely it made me feel a bit tearful, how kind people are. Getting letters is a pleasure I had almost forgotten, it made us both very happy.
We are at work now. Oliver is still not very well and is being looked after by Lucy.
I hope he gets better before we go.
Ritalin Boy isn’t better yet.
