Will this crap never end??????????????????????????????????????

I am sooooooooooo over it all right now.

It all began on May 7 when my stepson came over with his sister for their usual access visit every second weekend.  Although this being Mothers Day weekend, it was only going to be for one night then we had to take them back on Saturday at 5pm so that they could spend Mothers Day with their Mum.  So it was for a whole 24 hour block of time, really not worth the two weeks of pure hell that I have endured since!!  I sound mean, I sound angry and yep I guess I am both but right now I just want to yell, scream, cry and kick something, really hard!!

You see, within 3 hours of being in our care, my stepson became ill.  You know the gastro type bug that has the vomiting and diahorrea and yeah well, I don't need to paint pictures, it is just horrid.  Anyway he was pretty sick, we were up and down every hour on the hour all night to him and because he is autistic he tends to react differently than you or I.  He has this charming habit of getting up, throwing up all over the floor and then lying in it,,,,,yep I know too graphic but that is what we were dealing with.  Not only were you cleaning the floor/walls whatever else, you then had to totally strip and shower him.  By the time you got it cleaned it was time to start over just about.  We found out that the step father had had gastro all week.....why did the mother not keep the kids there to stop it spreading you ask?  I have asked the same question many times and come up with nothing other than a few very descriptive words that I won't share here.  Why risk the health of another group of people with this bug when it was only for a 24 hour access period that could have easily been made up during the week or at the following access weekend.


Anyway, I did have a lovely Mothers Day, the one day in the two week block where I have not had to deal with sick people!  Monday Mr8 came down with it really bad, so bad that I ended up at the hospital with him Tuesday night as he became dehydrated as I just couldn't get enough fluids down into him before they came back up again.  He was discharged Wednesday afternoon but was still pretty sick Thursday and Friday as well.

My boys were due to go to their Dad's on Friday and Saturday night but as he was still sick, the other 3 went and Mr8 stayed behind.  Saturday thankfully, he perked right up and so I dropped him off at Dad's at about 4pm.

Hubby and I had been feeling slightly off all week, but it had'nt eventuated to anything.  Well I guess I was silly and allowed myself to relax and WHOOSH Sunday morning I woke to a freight train running through my head (literally it felt).  Mine began differently with a fever and aches and then progressed into a milder stomach bug, still with the vomiting and diahorrea but much less severe.  The boys came back Sunday night only to find that Mr13 had come down with it and he too had it like I did rather than like Mr8 had had it.

So Monday saw Mr13 and I both laid up feeling very ill.  Hubby was running around stocking up on easy meals for me to cook for the rest of the week as he was leaving for a work trip to Melbourne Tuesday morning and wouldn't be back till Friday night (lovely timing!).

Tuesday morning came and I felt like death warmed up.  Yes the vomiting had slowed and thanks to gastro stop the diahorrea had settled but I just wanted to curl into a ball and stay there.

Tuesday night Mr10 said he was feeling off.  Dread ran through me, and he had me up several times during the night feeling like he would be sick, but thankfully nothing eventuated.  Of course I thought I had best keep him home from school to be on the safe side, although within an hour I really began to doubt his illness altogether as he seemed very chirpy, definitely not how I felt!!

Wednesday night came and Mr13 and Mr10 both declared that they would be okay to go to school.  Yippee I thought a day where I can actually relax and not have to cater to anyone for that 6 hour school block......no such luck.  I was woken by Mr15 at 1.30am saying he had just been sick.

So here we are Thursday morning and I have Mr15 at home, he seems relatively ok, just a little off, and Mr13 who declared he just didn't have the energy and still felt blah.  Well I couldn't really argue as that is exactly how I am feeling as well.

I am so sick of being sick and being surrounded by sick people.  I want this darn bug out of my house and out of my life.  But I know what will happen.  Mr10 will come down with it for real in the next day or two.  Then hubby will come back tomorrow night and one of two things will happen.  He will either get sick on Saturday once he relaxes into the weekend and then be a "typical sick male" for me for the next week or he will hang out for the weekend (his kids will be back again) and get sick on Monday/Tuesday and I will have him home all next week.

Geez I don't eve know if all this actually makes sense lol, I am so tired and run down.  Why has this bug taken so darn long to pass from one to another????????????????

AAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,,(That is the scream that I am dying to let out right now.  I would really like to act like a spoilt little brat and throw a massive tantrum (you know the full on kicking and screaming toddler type lol) but for the sake of the kids I won't.

Here's to brighter days ahead...........please!

Dehydration Gastro and Severe Sleep Deprivation

What an absolutely horrible 48 hours I have just had.  My poor baby, Mr8 came down with the most horrific gastro type bug on Monday night which saw him and I up every 20 minutes to half hour throughout Monday night.  The poor little kid was so so sick!!  Not to be too graphic, but lets just say it both ends of his body joined the gastro party at the same time, every time.  He couldn't keep anything down.  Luckily he was eager to drink but all day we battled trying to come to some sort of balance between his intake and his body's output.  Tuesday night I called a locum out to see him and he said yes he was dehydrated and if, after giving him a table to help with nausea, it didn't make a difference within the hour, he was to go to hospital.  Sadly, after struggling to swallow the tablet, it revisited less than 2 minutes later.  Needless to say at 10pm on Tuesday night he and I were making our way to hospital.


  We arrived at the hospital where the triage nurse got him a bed to lie on and also gave him an iceblock and a glass of hydralyte.  He hadn't much enjoyed the hydralyte that I had been trying to force down his throat that day but he humoured her and drank a little at least.   He loved the iceblock so that was nice to see at least.  He lay down and had a little sleep as he was pretty tired from the previous night and hadn't had any sleep that day.  Twenty minutes later he sat up to talk to me and power chucked what seemed like a gallon of liquid, unbelievable!!!

Finally, at 11.30pm we were ushered into the Accident & Emergency section.  They took his obs again and said "a doctor will see you shortly"........4am in the morning a doctor finally came to see him.  Thankfully he had fallen asleep at about 12.30, so had at least got some much needed sleep and most of all, he hadn't chucked in over 4 hours.  They decided that he would need to be placed on a drip and this was finally hooked up in his right arm at about 5.30am.  Half an hour later they decided that he should be admitted, but they had no beds available so he would need to be taken by ambulance to the Womens and Childrens Hospital in the city.  This would be done ASAP but they wanted him to have the second bag of his drip first and therefore we should have another canula inserted into the other arm, a larger one, so that it would go faster.  My brave little boy, barely wimpered for the first one, and was pretty much asleep for the second, until the needle hit the skin, when he received a very rude awakening.  In went the second canula and the second drip started.  I was advised to rush my car which was still parked in the carpark back home and get hubby to bring me back so that I could accompany him in the ambulance.  This I did, only to discover I didn't need to rush so much after all, it was 45 after I returned that the ambulance finally arrived.

We got into the Womens and Childrens Hospital by 9am and started the whole process of describing what was wrong with him all over again.  They unplugged the third bag of fluid from his IV declaring that he had had enough, and he would just be given 80mls of hydralite every 20 minutes to drink and he managed to keep it down he could go home........we didn't even need a bed in a ward!!!!!  Why the first hospital couldn't have done the same thing I don't know!!!!  Needless to say my little soldier managed to keep it down and we were discharged at 12.30pm.  The whole thing made me so angry as that was a total waste of an ambulance trip.  Luckily we are covered but thats not the point!!!

I am over emotional, at the moment due sleep deprivation.  After enduring Monday nights constant interruptions with my Baby I got no sleep whatsoever last night as I simply cannot sleep sitting in a chair.  My eyes are hanging out of my head and I cannot wait until bed time tonight.  I have never looked forward to going to bed so much in my life lol!!!!

The best part of all is that my little boy is returning slowly.  The little sparkle is coming back into his eyes and his voice has lost the dull whiny sound, replaced by his bright bubbliness.

Keep your fingers crossed that he continues to improve for me!!!......and that no one else succumbs to that horrible bug!!!

Thinking and Pondering Life instead of blogging....

That's what I have been doing lol.

I have been doing plenty of blog reading, just no writing. Life has just been plodding along and I seem to be racing around at a million miles an hour but not achieving much.......do you know what I mean???

Last week Mr8 had swimming with his school and so I volunteered to help with the walk to the pool and the change room chaos that junior primary school kids create when they have their swimming lessons.....needless to say lol, it was a very long week.

This weekend was our weekend with all the kids and we had planned to go and visit my mum in the nursing home on the Saturday as my stepkids were only with us for the Saturday due to Mother's Day on Sunday. So we thought, well cool, we will go and see my mum with all the kids, she would like that. But that wasn't to be, Mr9 with Autism came down with a vomiting bug on Friday night and we spent all day Saturday cleaning up behind him. He has this horrible habit of when he throws up (which naturally is never in the toilet) to then proceed to lie down right next to it and sadly, often in it.......it was a very challenging day!!! I was so happy to send him back home on Saturday night much to his mother's horror. But I was so mad, when she then pointed the finger at our house for passing the bug on to him when as we found out from my step daughter, they had had a gastro bug in their house that week!! None of my kids have been sick!!! I really don't know how or why she does things like that. The child got picked up at 5.30pm Friday night and was sick at 9pm, seriously, how fast does she think bugs travel??? I was angry because she didn't even mention that her partner had been sick with the same type of bug since Monday!! Does she seriously think that her daughter wouldn't tell us (although having said that I suspect that she had been told not to tell us!). Grrrrr........

Anyway yesterday, Mother's Day was lovely. I got spoilt and although we ran out of time to actually go out and enjoy the Autumn weather like I would have liked to do, it was a lovely day. Due to early morning soccer game (which my Hubby took my son to) I got to stay in bed till 10am reading my new book that my Hubby got me for Mothers Day,,,,,Multiple Bles8ings (the book by Kate Gosselin from Jon and Kate Plus 8). I have been wanting that book for ages and my darling Hubby managed to get me one from America. I am half way through it already and I love it.

Hubby got home from soccer and then made pancakes for brunch. Yummo, he tried out a new recipe which had berries and ricotta cheese in them and they were quite nice!!

We then went up to visit my mum but sadly she was asleep and she is very hard to wake up so I let her sleep and had to promise the boys we would come up again in a couple of weeks.

I went up to see my mum today and I have come away feeling very depressed. She has dementia and I can see her slipping away a little more each week. I really feel (and I don't really know if it is possible but I believe it is) that putting her into the nursing home last year is what has pushed the dementia further along. Early last year she was only just beginning to get forgetful etc but within weeks of putting her into the nursing home, she slipped into a world of imagination. Now it is very hard to hold a conversation with her. I prattle on about what the kids have been doing etc and she does remember us all, but her sense of reality is gone. I asked her if she had seen the plant that we got her for Mother's Day and she had no idea what I was talking about. She kept going on about flowers my brother had sent her that were sitting on the mantel piece (she doesn't have a mantel piece) and she didn't want me to take her to see the plant and card we got her. Every time I leave her I have to get her to stay put, she keeps saying "I'll just get my bag and I'll be ready", I tell her no she has to stay there, morning tea will be coming soon......its just so hard and so so sad. I really don't want to get old, really I don't. I sincerely hope when I am 80 that I will still have all my faculties about me. Mum is almost totally blind and diabetic which doesn't help matters any.

Well this has turned into a depressing post hasn't it lol.

My real reason for posting today was to let everyone know that I will be starting up a new blog. I have decided that this will be my blog about our day to day lives (aka my ranting and raving space lol) and I will start a new blog which will feature my recipes and any craftwork I do (am hoping to get alot of crafting done soon!!!). It may take a while to get going but I hope for it to turn into something that people can go to for ideas and inspiration.

Hubby has started a new job (within the same company) and it will occupy a lot more of his headspace and most likely time, so I need to find something for myself to do so I don't go mad lol. I decided it may well be time to start trying out some different crafts that I never had time for before.

I hope everyone had a lovely day for Mother's Day and got well and truly spoilt by their children!!