I hesitate to write about the minutiae of my life or indeed something as common as the cold, but sickness has had such an impact on our household this week it cannot be ignored!

I felt the mushrooming of a cold last weekend, and was mildly irritated as I had a busy week coming up, but dismissed it. Husband was just about recovering from one already and I felt we couldn’t be unlucky enough for us both to be attacked. By Monday morning I was feeling slightly rough but after a big night in town drinking the night before I had to put it down to my late night shenanigans.

My own early stirrings of illness however were completely blown away by a phone call from nursery just as I was about to step on a train for a lovely client lunch in London. “We need to talk about the spots” Spots? What spots? Hurrying back from work to pick up Boy I was surprised to see that the child with peachy perfect skin I had dressed not two hours before was now ablaze with burgeoning blisters and starting to resemble a piece of salami. Chicken Pox! They handed him back saying they didn’t want to see him for a long while and I felt my week crumbling away… OK. So a few days of nursing at home, cuddling and applying cream, how hard could it be? We’d been through the meningitis scares, the ear infections, the nappy rash, the colds (I could go on) and I knew how to comfort my boy. A quick work handover and we settled into our week of convalescence.

By that afternoon my throat was filled with razor blades, my head with cotton wool and my temperature was running about the same as my son’s. Coughing and spluttering I rang up Husband to explain our predicament but he was already on his way home from work and not feeling too clever himself. A trip to the doctors revealed that he had a stomach virus. Disaster. Our three illnesses had collided, colluded! And the dog was in no position to help us.

These last few days have been difficult to say the least. Whilst Husband and I have been trying desperately to find a space for our own illness, we’ve been sharing Pox Boy duty and still trying to attend a day or two of work (despite both being ill enough to be at home) and keep the house running almost normally. There is little sleep, a lot of crying and plenty of pain. I think that our last few days would be a good snapshot of family life to show to a teenager thinking of taking that first sexual step without protection. This smelly, spotty, sweaty, sweary week has been as far away from the broderie-anglaise baby dream that I could ever imagine.

Oh and on top of all of this we are currently having a new kitchen installed! Which means we have little access to our fridge, food, heating, etc, you know all of those things that you need to help smooth the path of an illness? Every day the young kitchen man has arrived to enter what now is essentially a sanatorium, I see the panic in his eyes – he has young children of his own – he knows surely his own surrender to our hell can’t be far away. As he leaves in the evening I imagine he wants to seal up the door behind him and with one of his little paint pots daub a big red cross on our front door. I would settle for him just painting the word PURGATORY above it.

Boy is coping with his illness stoically and well, better than I am. There are plenty of tears and sleepless nights and he is incredibly clingy, but that is fine and Husband and I give him everything he needs. We just wish we were healthier so that this round the clock care wasn’t extending our own illnesses. I had two hours sleep last night – one at 10pm and one at 4am. Between Boy’s crying, my hacking cough and Husband tossing and turning in pain I imagine tonight will be pretty much the same. I am looking fondly back on those first few charmed months of having a newborn baby as easy now, you were running on adrenaline and a spot of breastfeeding usually sorted everything out. Now my virus laden limbs can barely take the aching walk from one room to the other.

So as we drift into the Easter weekend wish us well. If you see some smoke going up around the Hove area it could be that the council have decided to raze our charnel house to the ground. Normal blogging service will resume next time hopefully, but if you want to take issue with my subject matter, my spelling, my grammar or turn of phrase this time then I am sorry – I told you I was ill.