After the Storm (hopefully)

The storm that was pneumonia has passed, leaving  manageable destruction in its wake.  The girl settled back to normal – eating like a horse, smiling like a lottery winner – within a few days of our getting home from hospital, the only minor hiccup being the trauma of getting both of them to take their medicine twice a day.  She just point-blank refused to take it, arching her back and screaming whenever the syringe was produced, gagging dramatically whenever we managed to get any in.  He (the likely source of the infection in the first place, so being dosed to prevent any further bouts) hid behind his hands and sobbed.  We managed to cajole him with chocolate (who can resist chocolate for breakfast and dinner?), but she was a bit trickier, so in the end resorted to brute force. Anyway, all was well that ended well, and the week passed and the horror medicine ended.

And then the Boy started to hack his lungs up again, and is now on a different antibiotic – as well as some sort of inhaler thingy (which I’ve been resisting to date, because it just seems so... invasive, getting him to breathe in drugs).  This one is particularly gruesome, bright yellow and smelling of banana flavouring.  As I type I can hear him in the kitchen sobbing while the Man says “don’t you want choc?” (Boy is sobbing “yes choc, no med-sin”).  It’s at the point now where I dread breakfast and dinner times.  In fact he is supposed to take it three times a day, but I just can’t face that, plus  given that his day only goes from 9 until 6, how can I squeeze in another hour-long trauma medicine-taking session?).

When he’s not sobbing behind his hands and hiding things with freshly-folded laundry (seems to be something of an obsession for him – involves finding a pile of folded clothes,  picking them up one by one and flinging them with gay abandon over his shoulder, then burrowing whatever he’s “hiding” underneath the pile -  and is driving me MAD) he continues to amuse us with his ever increasing vocabulary (“Mummy, look at my shadow!”;  “Big green dinosaur, very sharp teeth, be careful Mummy”, and my favourite this week “Oh dear God, box broken, oh well”).  There are even some manners in there – “No!” has become “No thank you Mummy” – which is somewhat disarming when you’re asking if he’d like to stop hammering his sister’s head in, or will he fetch his boots please. 

The Girl has started to become an interactive little thing as well, which brought tears to the grown-ups' eyes this week.  She spent dinner time the other night trying to catch the Boy’s eye then laughing her fat little head off whenever she did, which in turn had him laughing (and us sniffling).  She’d holding things and seems astonished and amazed when she realises that she can actually bring things up to her face and eat them. Speaking of which,  she’s taken to solid food like a pope to Catholicism.  In the space of a few days she’s definitely become alot chunkier, possibly due to the two (very) large bowls of rice and fruit puree she now has a day;  that’s on top of the several gallons of milk she downs.   As a result, we’ve been treated to a couple of 8am lie-ins, a glimpse of something akin to our old lives.

So overall, anti-biotics and germs aside, we’re in a phase – no doubt short – of relative calm.  Fingers crossed it’s calm after the recent storm, and not the portend of choppy seas ahead...