Poor me

I haven’t had a sick day since the boys were born. It’s not that I haven’t been sick, it’s just that it’s always been more peaceful in the office than at home. All weekend I have had a miserable sore throat and this morning I just couldn’t face going in. I couldn’t face staying in either. Mr. Waffle offered to ask the upstairs neighbours for the use of their spare room but in the end I just barricaded myself in our bedroom. The cleaner said she would not clean it and the childminder, very kindly, said that she would take the boys to her house. The problem with the latter is that I now have to collect the Princess from school and have just dragged myself from my sick bed to do so. Not too sick to blog though, just thought you’d like to know that.

The trip to Ireland was relatively uneventful but I think Shannon to Cork to Dublin to Brussels is a lot of travelling to ask a little girl (and her sick Mummy) to do in three days and I don’t think I would try it again. The Princess was a little bewildered by it all and yesterday morning when I explained that we would be leaving that evening she said dolefully “but we’ve just arrived”.

Travelling with one child is delightfully easy. I could have wished that, as we queued to get on the plane at Shannon she hadn’t announced loudly “Jesus” (getting everyone’s attention) “Mummy when we went to the toilet, we forgot to wipe my bottom”. I was able to reassure our amused fellow travellers that, in fact, we hadn’t. Dublin airport was a drag as we landed at pier D which meant a trek through miles of prefab to get to baggage reclaim but otherwise uneventful. The Princess has her own bag for travelling and she likes to fill it with random items. This meant that on the way back to Brussels her bag contained a couple of books, a sandwich, a wicker cat, two finger puppets and an array of shells and stones which she had picked up on the beach with her loving grandparents that morning. I represented to her strongly that these would be better off in Dublin but to no avail. The bag weighed a ton. I relied on security to come to my rescue. After all we couldn’t take through a half bottle of water, surely they would insist that we remove our rocks, sufficient in number to bury the pilot but, alas, no. We could have stoned the pilot to death with our supply but they didn’t care.

So coming in to Brussels airport I was carrying her coat, my coat, doggy, her enormously heavy bag and my handbag. I suppose I was better off than Charlie McCreevy who was sitting in row 1 on the plane. The air hostess had solicitously packed his bag into an overhead bin in row 5 and he was impatiently watching the plane empty while hoping that he would eventually be able to get it. Oh how the mighty are humbled by the disappearance of business class.

That is all. I am off to collect herself, place her tenderly in front of “Barbie of Swan Lake” and return to my sick bed.