More baby sickness

I forgot to update, but Anya's infected hand has now totally cleared up, leaving a dull smooth scar which will probably vanish as time goes by. This being toddlerhood, however, one ailment is following fast on the heels of the last.

This time it's the gastro flu. Her baby-friend Sofia (OK, the daughter of our friends Jessie and Mark) has apparently had an awful bout of vomiting of late, even losing weight with it all, and it has apparently been running through all the playgroups. So it was pretty inevitable that it would come to Anya.

That meant that I ended up working from home today, as the little one isn't allowed into playgroup due to the tummy bug and Kate has just started working full days so couldn't just take the day off.

Anya had a slight fever earlier in the day but, as I've said before, her general good humour makes dealing with this sort of thing so much easier. After I discovered the fever I gave her a dose of baby paracetamol to lower her temperature--a sickly numbing liquid that tastes of cloves dipped in saccharine. She clamped her lips on the syringe and sucked it down like it was breastmilk. Even when she vomited--first a lilac number after I gave her blueberry porridge for breakfast, and later a complementary pool of mango-yellow slime after her lunch--she did it with a smile, and certainly more of a smile than I showed as I ran around trying to clean it up.

Of course she was occasionally a bit whingey, as I am when I get sick. But she still made us laugh all day. Early in the morning, when I put her down in the lounge clutching her security bunny, she spotted something in her daycare bag and made a beeline for it: a second, identical bunny! We have three of them because she gets them dirty so fast from all the loving she gives them; so far we have managed to make sure that she never saw more than one bunny at once. Well, so much for that. She held them both in the air and grinned at me, like a hunter showing off a brace of pheasants. Double the bunny, double the fun.