Living Arrows 2021 – Week 19 – Mummascribbles

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth”

I didn’t manage to write this post last week because I had a very poorly Oscar and I was exhausted from looking after him and playing all the Mario he wanted me to play! It was last Sunday night when he woke up and I heard that noise. The one I have gotten used to hearing once a year – the raspy breathing, the barky, hoarse voice. Croup. I’d hoped he’d have grown out of it by now, but alas – apparently not. We managed to get through the night calmly, but I knew I needed to get him seen, and we were referred up to A&E by an out of hours GP. I was a bit nervous about a) having to visit a new hospital by myself – where to park, where I needed to go, etc! But also because of the Covid situation. I know hospitals are a lot better now that we have less cases, but it is still a worry isn’t it?

Thankfully we were sent straight to the paediatrics A&E which was nice and quiet. The nurses were amazing, they gave him steroids followed by a nebuliser, and then sent us home once they were happy with his improvement. Thankfully it worked and his raspy breathing was no longer and he was just left with the usual rubbish cough. A cough that always needs to be kept under control though, for fear of him ending up back in hospital. And so I basically made him sit down all week (hence the Mario marathons). The most exciting thing he got up to was sitting in the kitchen after I had just unboxed our new sideboard, and helping me to break up all the polystyrene to throw away. He thought it was the best thing ever because he was basically just creating snow! And it kept him off technology for half an hour whilst also not enhancing the cough!

Zach had a week of Daddy taking him to school which he loved, and I mostly tried to keep things calm when he got home each day, although of course, all they wanted to do was run around and have fun. Zach is obsessed with all things dinosaur at the moment. He loves watching all the Jurassic Park movies, he plays with the toy dinosaurs, he reads about dinosaurs, he plays a lot of Jurassic World Evolution on the PC, and he does a lot of pretend play with Oscar when they go around hunting dinosaurs. And when he got himself dressed in his cargo combination, grabbed his nerf gun, and put his backpack on, a dinosaur hunter is exactly what he was! It made me laugh so much. I think he is more into dinosaurs now than he ever has been before!

We seem to be back to normality now. Oscar had the whole week off nursery but has gone back in this week, and his cough has gone. Fingers crossed that’s it for this year. And they say that as they get older, they should grow out of it. I’ve become used to the hospital visits though because he has had it every year so far (except maybe in 2020 because we spent most of it in lockdown germ free).