
Goodness, another very long wait for me to update this blog, sorry! It is due to a malicious and evil flu bug that struck me down in mid-December.
This was The Bug.
The Big Bag Bug of Horror and Meanness.
No, I'm not sure my picture above does justice to it either.
I was out of it for the first week of the illness, including hallucinations about about corpses and monsters. I was wiped out the second week (Happy Christmas!) and here we are nearly 4 weeks later and I STILL haven't thrown it ... and I haven't got my voice back.
That's right. For over 3 weeks, I have only been able to whisper. No comments about Tom being a lucky man, please!
Caitlin was very cross with me to start with.
"Speak properly, Mummy!" she scolded me, "Don't whisper!"
"I can't help it, I've lost my voice", I whispered back.
After that, she tried to come up with a practical solution. She busied herself looking for my voice everywhere and then, success!
"Mummy! I've found your voice!" she exclaimed, "It was here under the sofa. I put it in your mouth!"
And she scuttled up to me, holding, well, frankly, nothing in her hand and proceeded to try to thrust her fist down my throat. Sadly, for both of us, it didn't work, except she bashed her hand on my teeth and burst into tears.
Now, she is quite resigned to it. When one of her friends at nursery asked me why I was whispering (it is extremely hard to make yourself heard when trying to whisper over the noise of a large number of toddlers during free play), Caitlin told him informatively, "My Mummy has lost her voice!"
And I asked her the other day, "Can you remember what Mummy's voice sounds like?" to which she replied, "No!"
Nice to know I make such a deep impression on my daughter.
I hadn't realised just how much I use various tones of voice to keep her well behaved. I rarely shout but somehow, and I don't know where I learnt it, I have developed The Mummy Tone. You know. The one that brooks no argument.
Yes, well, that doesn't work with a whisper. You just get a kind of lurching croak at moments of sheer desperation (like when she's wriggled her hand from mine and is about to run off in a car park). The croak sounds distressingly loud after all the whispering and inevitably makes her cry. Which, in my overtired state, makes me want to cry too!
Just to make matters worse, she has really learnt to play me just lately and being ill and tired makes me extremely easy to play. So I also have to deal with things like this: "You made me cry, Mummy," (lip wobbling, one tear down the cheek) "You shouted at me and that made me sad."
Then on New Year's Eve, Tom fell of his bike in the black ice (he cycles to work) and sprained both his wrists so badly that he couldn't even turn the key in the lock that afternoon when he came home. So for the best part of a week, I ended up dressing him as well as Caitlin! I had to reach somewhat higher to lift the jumpers off for him!
Then poor Tom got a tummy bug for 2 days following that. Yes, we are the House of Health. And still I couldn't shake this wretched bug (probably as no rest for the wicked or the ill when you have a toddler and a handless husband).
The only well person in our house was Caitlin, who unlike me and Tom, was filled with joy of life and a distressingly large amount of energy ... and was bouncing off the walls with boredom as I didn't have the strength to take her out!
I think thanks to salt water gargling, I'm turning the corner now - although last Friday in work I couldn't even whisper because of the pain in my throat and spent meetings passing notes to people that they had to read out for me!
But ... Caitlin went back to nursery this week (as like a slave driving fool, I made myself go back to work) and guess what? The germ factory strikes again and she's back with a horrid runny noise. Yes, that is how it all started last time ....
Happy New Year!!!???!!
Ellie x
P.S. No fun Christmas stories to tell you because after all that build up, I was too ill to remember much of it, but Father Christmas delivered all but the pony (bad lucky, Daddy). I might tell you about Baby Annabel next time ....