Ups and Downs

One of those up-y down-y kind of days.

Late start after being kept awake most of the night by Conor's horrible cough. Nothing you can do about it in the night - the asthma medicine didn't seem to help, and being held sitting up wasn't helping much either. He was keen to go to nursery, so did.

I went in to do an eco project with the kids at school - shown above. We are studying how long it takes for different types of rubbish to decompose. They're a fun crowd so that was an ok way to spend 45 minutes.

Home with Conor then off to the docs when they opened. Doc felt Conor was having an acute worsening of asthma, exacerbated by a cold and some allergy symptoms. Prescribed a short course of steroids. He said to mix them in water, they would fizz and go pink and then drink them. Nasty taste, so follow it up quickly with a nice drink. Pharmacy gave me the tablets, went home, mixed them with water. Seemed to have to bash them up a lot more than the doc had indicated, but never mind - we pressed on and tried to give it to Conor. Nothing doing. He's had various medicines all his life and never really had a problem with them. But he wasn't having this.

All attempts at bribery, coercion, threats and even mean subterfuge failed.

So he went to bed with none of that medicine. He's feverish so has had Calpol* to help him sleep. Why can't all medicine taste like Calpol?

Then I looked more closely at the information leaflet and found that these are gastro-resistant tablets - which you are supposed to swallow whole and not crush. The pharmacy label says "soluble" but the tablets are not. I'm trying to ignore the scary internet sites that speak of the dangers of crushing tablets like this - he ended up taking so little of it that I can't imagine it could do him any harm.

So tomorrow a little trip to the pharmacy to find out what's going on.

Sorry for just pouring all that out: Mr B is away so, just as he is often a blip widow, so you lot will have to put up with the venting when he's away.

I'm sure all will be well, but there are times when it's totally rubbish being responsible for someone else's wellbeing.

* For those not in the know, it's a kiddie paracetamol. Tastes of sickly artificial strawberries. Known in our house as 'pink medicine'. Magic stuff.