Bloom

I was trying, Housekeepers. I was trying to bloom into I know not what. I took the gift that is a New Year bursting with possibility, and I was going to use it to explode into beautiful life. Not by resolution. But  by commitment to what already is: this site,  my long treasured rituals, meditation, chocolate.  All those things that sustain me.
I was trying, People! I declared my intention to savour the simple in my last post. I hunted high and low for a new theme for BrocanteHome and last Thursday evening found one I ADORE. I ate nuts and seeds and sprouts and juiced cucumber and blueberries and pretty much anything purporting to be a vegetable.  I meditated. Worked on The Art of Homemaking ready for it’s imminent launch. Felt good. And dementedly organised. And a little bit happy. And only mildly off my head.
That night I even discovered a tiny cheery little app called Bloom*, that promised with song, ceremony and a spoonful of visual inspiration to send me little reminders to do all those things a person is supposed to do once they have committed themselves to Betterville and thus I spent a quiet half hour with my socked up feet propped up on cushions setting reminders to do the basic stuff of life: stretch, drink water, go to bed early, have a 27 fling boogie, pay bills, dance, and say thank you. I was for a while dedicated to my own cause and it felt like some kind wonderful. A route to better Mummyhood, Vintage housekeeping and happiness.
So we all know where this is going don’t we? We all know what happens when this here Housekeeper goes getting a little smug? Heckity pie, doesn’t life just go and throw a curve-ball at all that should be the hallowed halls of the kind of January we so richly deserve??
It was four o’clock on Friday morning when I heard him. A sad, mournful little wail I initially took to be part of a haunting dream I was barely enjoying. I ignored it. And then I ignored it again. In fact, I must confess I ignored it for a good half hour because I thought my fuzzy wuzzy head was playing tricks on me and not even for a moment did it enter my mind that said noise was in fact my little Finn breaking his heart because a wretched, excruciating pain in his groin had broken his sleep and left him unable to stand up.
And there he was. His blue tartaned self sobbing. Pain written large all over his face. Screaming whenever I tried to manoeuvre  him into a better position and utterly unable to move by himself. I was terrified. He was terrified. We rang Daddy. It was the middle of the night. He was groggy.  a couple of hours later we were wheeling our little boy into the children’s hospital in a wheelchair, and steeling ourselves for the usual inordinately long wait a visit to A and E usually involves.
By the end of the day we had a diagnosis and a bag full of Codeine and Ibroprofen. Finley has fluid on his hip, an apparently relatively common calamity that most often strikes little boys of Finn’s age following infection or virus and leaves them unable to walk until the fluid starts to disperse. My little man has been carted up and down the stairs by the men of family, equipped with a bell to jangle when he wants to turn over in bed and thoroughly and absolutely spoiled rotten because he is a little trooper so very often stuck on the couch because a somewhat disastrous immune system knocks him for a six far more often than it should.
And so I have been Nurse Mummy. I have served up fish fingers and played story cubes. I have force fed him more painkillers than any one little person should be forced to tolerate and tried to understand the mystery that is Pokemon diamond. And throughout it all Finn has grinned and laughed and told rubbish jokes and I have remembered what is important in this life and felt my focus shift firmly into the realms of Mummyhood.
Tonight he is walking again, though he will be off school for another week to rest, and back in hospital on Friday. All my plans are up in the air. On hold. I am behind on everything. Unable to concentrate for being rather wonderfully at his beck and call.  And so I am holing up for the week: baking cherry shortbread and chorizo stew. Sitting for hours on end with Finn on my knee as though he were a baby again. Stock-piling magazines for the times he doesn’t require my attention and choosing by way of subscription to the kind of partworks destined I think to cost a silly fortune, to declare this my Agatha Christie season.
Which would have been all well and good were it not for my little joker Finley. For did he not just pick up the very first book in the series, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, flick to the back page and announce with a smirk on his cheeky little face, Mum? Don’t bother reading this, it was Parker whodunnit.
NOOOOOOO! It was Parker whodunnit?? Was it? Is he kidding me? No don’t tell me! Please let him be kidding me…
This then is the thanks a dedicated Nurse Mummy gets.

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