In an uncharacteristic moment of spontaneous joy and excitement last week, we booked a last-minute trip to Fiji. We leave tomorrow at 6.30 am. So in an entirely characteristic display of Murphy’s Bloody Buggery Law, we awoke this morning at 4 o’clock to the sound of a cat horking up a furball in kids’ room. Only it wasn’t a cat, and it wasn’t a furball. It was Garnet, and it was his dinner.
Two hours and all the towels in the house later, he was a limp pile of empty little boy on the sofa, and I was reading the fine print on the travel insurance policy. We could cancel, but since it is now almost March, we realise this is just the beginning of the illness for the year, and there’s a very good chance that someone in this family will be sick at every point until next summer. We can’t wait that long for this holiday. We’ve kept Garnet pretty clear of May Blossom, so we thought perhaps she could avoid the bug and we could go in the morning as planned. The doctor examined him and declared him to be fine, and she recommended we go ahead with the trip.
By 11 am I was feeling reasonably confident. There was no more vomit, and Garnet had a very pleasant day being allowed to watch unlimited episodes of Spot, which is fairly anaesthetising. He was well enough that I took him with me to pick up May Blossom from pre-school, where I found a significantly smaller class than usual, smelling strongly of disinfectant. Four kids, including May Blossom’s best kindy friend, had thrown up and gone home early. The odds of May Blossom coming out of tonight smelling of roses are not in her favour.
But we are trooping on regardless. We have many changes of clothes in the carry-on bag, plenty of wet wipes and rehydration solution. By the end of the day Garnet was his usual self, leaping about shouting ‘Bula!’ and getting the furies when he wasn’t allowed to go walking up the street to practice pulling his Dora the Explorer suitcase behind him while I was cooking dinner. May Blossom went to sleep with a sore tummy and a bucket beside the bed but a steely determination to be drinking from a coconut by sundown tomorrow.
Let’s hope we all are.