Illness and breaking and entering

Sometimes I feel like one or other of us is always ill.  Having just recovered from last week’s illness (which she transmitted to myself and Mr. Waffle), the poor Princess has come down with some new bug.  She is at this moment lying in a darkened room snuffling and sucking her thumb.  She was awake all night roaring.  I really don’t know what’s wrong with her.  She has a mild temperature this morning but is otherwise reasonably sunny. This parenting lark is more difficult than I was led to believe.

Yesterday was a beautiful day, 20 degrees and sunny.  I went for a walk in the park with F and her two children. She left me with them very briefly while she went back to her house to get something and I had a brief insight as to what it might be like to have 3 children aged 3, 11 months and 7 weeks.  Let me summarise for you: terrifying.

And in other news.  I may not have mentioned, but we are landlords.  Before we left Ireland we spent all our money on a deposit for a small house.  It is now let out to tenants.  When D was over, she told me that she heard one of our tenants on the the Marian Finucane show.  We were nervous, did she complain to the nation that we are bad landlords?  Apparently not, but she did complain that there was no burglar alarm in the house and her laptop got nicked.  The manner in which the burglar gained entry has caused us some concern.  The burglary was carried out between 10 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon and the burglar got in by breaking down the front door with a pickaxe.  Does this say to you that our house is in a nice part of town where people look our for their neighbours?  Ok, we knew that it was a bit of a rough area when we bought the house (I mean otherwise, how could we possibly have afforded it?), but still…I think we were told that it was an up and coming area.  Anyway, replacing the door cost 800 euro which is quite extraordinary.  However, in fairness, the cheque from the insurance company came in the door yesterday to our extreme delight.  I was just working out how we might spend it when Mr. Waffle pointed out that we should probably use the money to fund a burglar alarm.  Deep sigh.