Winter Sickness

Clearly I wasn’t touching wood when I declared no one in our house had been sick all year. As punishment, that night it started. Word in the hood was that kids were dropping like flies from a particularly nasty viral bug doing the rounds and Master Four was first to bring it home. Unusually quiet and listless, he stayed home from kindy the next day. 
Strangely, when one twin gets sick the other has boundless energy and as Miss Four bounced off the walls I thought ‘Just you wait – you’ll be next’. 
Sure enough, the next day she went down but when Miss Four gets sick she gets it three times as bad as the boys. After the weekend, while her brother was fine to go back to kindy, she lay on the couch whacked after a night of croup and now delirious from a temperature raging up near 40 degrees. 
The delirium caused her to wake lashing out and accusing me of all sorts of things there was no way I could have done. At this point, in walked a pale Master Seven from school, who promptly put himself straight to bed. 
The next day I had a dilemma. It was the twin’s first school visit and Master Four was itching to go. There was no way his sister was up to it so we resigned to staying home. But then, after a collective dose of Pamol, Ibuprofen and Broncial Syrup, she suddenly “came right”. 
It probably wasn’t my best call but, with two now begging me to take them up to school, I decided to go for a little while and sit Miss Four up the back with me. It’s funny how the loudest of children suddenly go shy when they first start school. However, as my school teacher mum always says, it doesn’t take them long to come out of their shells and by the end of the morning Master Four had already received his first ‘growling’ for being too loud. (The kindy teachers later told me their ears had a nice rest that day.) 
Anyhow Miss Four pulled it off and came home and slept off her big morning. 
Of course, if there’s one thing kids are good at sharing it’s their germs and, after a week of them coughing in my face, it was inevitable that I’d catch the bug. This is when I really began to appreciate what the kids had been going through and wished I’d been more sympathetic. 
I’m no hypochondriac but the headaches were a killer and, still dealing with three kids who were not 100 per cent, I was beginning to feel a little delirious myself. This became apparent when I went to give Miss Four another dose of Pamol and she pointed out that she’d just had one. With three different types of medicine on the go for three children at different stages of their sickness, I was basically a walking medicine dispensary and in my sleep-deprived, ailing confusion, I’d forgotten the golden rule: write down every dosage. “So which medicine did I just give you?” I asked Master Seven. “The white or the pink one?” 
“Remember mummy?” he asked, looking at me like I was barmy. “You just gave me the pink one and Jai the white.” 
This was when I started the dispensary chart before putting us all to bed. 
To top off the bad week I had to make a last-minute emergency journey down to Mount Maunganui. Driving for five hours while in this condition is not ideal and I longed for the days when one could actually stay sick in bed. 
Anyhow, apart from the last vestiges of that nasty bug – the ongoing cough – I’m pleased to say we’ve come out the other side. 
And I’ve learnt my lesson – I’m touching wood.