Tilly Tatas: Kind of glad the holidays are over!

Nipper will only attend school for five and a half days in total this month what with the Easter break, the bank holidays and the Royal Wedding. I was getting pretty stressed about how I was going to get through the month quite frankly. However, it went better than expected with regard to keeping Nipper happy (and me not having a nervous breakdown in the process!) but was a bit of a disaster in several other ways.

The family worker at our local children's centre told me about an inclusive holiday playclub which is able to cater for kids with additional needs. This was a godsend! Nipper went from 9am to 3pm for a several days across the holidays and had a lovely time of it. We'll definitely be doing this again.

Our family has otherwise spent a good deal of time in the company of the NHS and the local vet over the holidays. Not really how we wanted to spend our time.

First incident - my Dad being rushed in to hospital in the middle of the night with suspected heart problems. Luckily it was Angina, they gave him some tablets, he'll have to go back in a few weeks for some tests, and three days later he was up a ladder re-felting his shed roof!

Next - we are due to visit Mr Earplugs' parents but get a phonecall the day before to say that his Mum has fallen off her push-bike, dislocated her ankle and broken her leg! Scratch those plans then. His Mum is in plaster but so far no need for any surgery and she's feeling pretty ok.

Then - Tiddler falls over the stairgate, goes airborne, and crashlands with his forehead against the edge of the cupboard resulting in a nasty split which requires a 3 hour stint in A&E. I won't have a rant here (much as I'd like to but it's getting late!) but they did a crap job of steristrip-ing it and after 5 days it was very nasty, swollen and 'oozing' so we spent another 3 hours in there to be told that it should have been stitched but it was now too late. It's still bleeding intermittantly (10 days after it happened) and he'll be left with a scar!

Onward with the holidays and Nipper gets a nasty bug and has a raging sore throat and temperature for 2 days. I dose him up with Calpol and on day 3 he comes out in a horrendous rash all over his body. I consult my 'kiddie diseases' book and it looks like it might be German Measles. We go down to the walk-in health centre (as it's the weekend) and we wait 'in isolation' for 3 hours to see a nurse who says it's not German Measles, just a nasty virus which presents like it. Apparantly they'd been inundated with kids with the same symptoms and had problems finding rooms to keep them all isolated until they could see the nurse. He's much better now but still has the rash.

Then the cherry on the top was the untimely demise of Scooter, Miss Muffett's guinea pig. She couldn't have chosen a worse moment as Miss Muffett had just gone off on holiday for a few days with her Dad! Poor Scooter has had a couple of difficult months, bless her. She had an injured eye and a small abcess which meant that we had to give her eye drops twice a day, and both oral antibiotics and painkillers by syringe. We had 5 trips to the vet with her and she made a remarkable recovery, much to the vet's surprise, given that she was an old lady in piggy terms at six and a half years old.
She was doing ok, then, all of a sudden, she was behaving oddly and couldn't balance. I took her to see the emergency vet (£103! Why do these things always happen at the weekend?!) Turns out that if a small animal looks ill then they are really ill, and if they look in a bad way then they really, really, really are in a bad way! I was prepared to give her all the medications again etc but the vet said she had little hope of recovering and it would be best to put her to sleep. Once she was dead he was able to examine her more fully and found that she had a lump in her tummy so most likely had a tumour.

We dug a big hole in the garden and popped her in it and Nipper was very pleased to know that Scooter was now going to be buried treasure!

He then announced that when she was better he'd be able to dig her up, before going off to fill up the watering can to water her, since we had just planted her! I think I'd better plant a shrub above her to stop him from digging her up (as I know that he will try to as and when the mood takes him!)