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Saturday, January 21, 2006

During the course of Thursday night, my poor Emmy threw up in her bed, in Sophie's bed, and in various other places throughout the house. Poor little chickie would start to feel awful, throw up, relocate and fall asleep for a while, and then wake up and repeat the process. A rather grim night for all concerned.

The bug seemed to be out of her system by morning, but she still had the weak yucky feeling one gets after a night like that, and clearly couldn't manage school. So it had arrived: the first time one of the kids was ill in a house with two working parents. In yesterday's case, Ems was okay enough to stay home by herself. She didn't mind; she was happy to just rest in our (clean) bed with her book. And I was only 3 miles away. But I minded. A lot. I like to pamper my children when they are feeling under the weather. I like to read to them and make them nourishing snacks and bring them soothing things to drink. But, since we need the money I'm earning if we're going to make ends meet here, I suppose that we just have to get through times like this.

Emily was feeling 100% again by this morning, so we took the train in to London and (at Bobby's suggestion)took the kids to look round Harrods. I am not entirely sure why Bobby suggested this, as he loathes and despises shopping, and particularly hates the sort of shopping where you don't intend to buy anything. And he was indeed totally underwhelmed and bored by the whole Harrods experience. The kids enjoyed the food hall though, where they were particularly admiring of the beautiful (and exorbitantly priced) pastries and chocolates. They are definitely our kids though; they calculated the cost of one of those gorgeous chocolates and decided they'd get better value for money at the local corner store. We did come away with some purchases though; there were bins of really nice young adult books in the toy section for 99p each, and we bought four. Discovered at the till that some of them had been marked down even further, so we spent a grand total of 2.71. (My keyboard won't make the pound sign).

When we'd had enough of Harrods, we walked across to Hyde Park.





We admired the birds at the pond and let Sophie burn off a bit of steam on the playground. Makes me sad when I think that before too long playgrounds will be irrelevant to our family; Steve hasn't played on them in years and Ems only goes on them to humour Sophie.





It was so nice to be outside and in the sun today. It's been grey and rainy here ever since Christmas Eve; yesterday afternoon was literally the first time that the sun had come out all year. It's supposed to rain and/or snow tomorrow so I'm glad we made the most of today.

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