It’s a tough gig.

You wouldn’t be a parent for all the tea in China.  It’s a tough gig.

You’d think it would be the newborn giving us grief, but unfortunately, it’s our eldest.

When we got home from hospital, Miss A had a cough.  It didn’t seem too bad.  Later that night, I crawled up the stairs to get into bed, I heard Miss A cough.  It just didn’t sit well, so I sent Dave down.  Sure enough, Miss A was hysterical.  I ‘ran’ (as best you can when you can’t even walk) downstairs in time to have her lose her battle and stop breathing.  Off Dave went to hospital.  The doctors were fabulous.  They couldn’t find anything wrong, and did a few tests and put it down to just a bit of bad luck.

The cough has since stuck around.  She went 36 hours straight this week, coughing so much she vomited.  She has good days and then it gets horrific.  We took her to the GP – there’s nothing serious, he says.

So we spent this weekend indoors, monitoring her raging fever!  After her 3 day coughing stint, she woke in the middle of the night in a pool of sweat, we thought she had beaten it – but it is back. 

It is so hard to watch your kid in pain, she’s terrified.  Now tonight she is complaining of a stomach ache.  We know she is sick, she declined dinner, asked to go to bed and kept telling me how tired she was.

It’s awful.  I just want to take it away for her.  I want to let her have a full nights sleep.  

I’d rather be up all night for a month with the newborn than have to watch her suffer with this any longer.  I can’t imagine how parents with seriously ill kids do it.  

The GP here is pretty good. Every time I’ve needed to see him for Anneke – they’ve fit me in straight away.  Today it was 20 minutes.  There’s nothing wrong with her chest or ears, but he agreed that having to change her sheets in the middle of the night for a week (due to sweating from temperature) isn’t idea. He’s prescribed antibiotics (almost unheard of in the Netherlands).  Miss A has never had antibiotics, so here’s hoping they do something.