So… here’s how the week started. Mrs Jerry went down with some horrible lurgi. Influenza A had been going around the town and especially at her place of work and given that a couple of people locally had died; it was with some trepidation that I made her comfortable in bed and left the house with pup #1 to visit a nearby Sunday market and load up on the organic veggies.
I knew that there would be the usual begging for shiny things all the way around the market and it’s pretty usual for our kids to want everything toylike and attractive and so I was prepared to come back with all the normal items of cheap crapola but it took several rounds of the market for him to commit to the exact piece of plastic that he hadn’t already snagged on previous visits. All of the time, I was fretting about Mrs Jerry and as soon as I could, we jumped back in the car and headed home.
When I got back, I could see that Mrs Jerry had deteriorated to the extent that she needed to see a doctor and quickly. The quickest and best way to get her professional help was to call an ambulance. Regular readers may recall that we are currently fostering not one, but two young boys? I knew that both of them had negative memories of the emergency services and I didn’t want them to see the ambo’s carting Mrs Jerry out of the house, so I shuffled them into the bedroom with an admonishment not to open the door and then asked our lovely neighbour to come over and look after them.
The delightful lady ambo’s arrived soon after and they very professionally retrieved Mrs Jerry from her sick bed and transferred her into the ambulance and I let the boys out of the bedroom, transferred control to our neighbour and followed the ambulance in the car. Over the next couple of hours, the test results thankfully discounted the Doctors first suspicions of meningitis and instead revealed the unholy trinity of a nasty flu, plus a sinus infection and just to top it off, a skull cracking migraine.
Returning home to collect some essentials, I noticed straightway that there was a hissing sound at the back of the house and saw that the sandy coloured woollen carpet had alarmingly become several shades darker. I rushed into the master bedroom and straight into what appeared to be a Turkish bath; not, I hasten to add, that I’m overly familiar with such places, having had a confusing experience at the hands of a Turkish masseur when still in my teens, but such was the heat and the steam, the same environment immediately came to mind.
Mentally dodging the steel trap like paws of a giant Turkish man, I ducked under the sink and saw that the flexible hot water line had burst and there had been several hours of scalding water soaking into the carpet, seeping through the floors and cascading into the heating ducts – AAAAARAGGGGHHHH!!!! Continuously cursing like an angry sailor, I resembled the steel ball in a pinball machine and pinged between the mains tap to turn the water off, the animal pens to feed and settle everyone up for the night and the closing hardware store and with literally minutes to spare, I bought the damaged part. I then wet footed it over to the hospital to bust Mrs Jerry out and get her back home to her own bed.
Kids are far from stupid of course, and when I later retrieved them from our neighbours house, pup #1 heartbreakingly asked if she had died? Thankfully, I was able to say that she’d be there when he woke up in the morning, which was doubly good as both boys have their own negative experiences of the emergency services and hospitals. I of course, was due to fly to India the very next morning for at least two weeks; but there was no question that I was going to cancel the trip and instead, stay at home to wrangle the nippers. The grown up side of the house was temporarily uninhabitable and so we had to move fast. Luckily, The insurance company was actually pretty responsive and later the following day, they supplied a consultant with several industrial blowers and a couple of jukebox sized de- humidifiers in order to try and prevent the floor and carpets from rotting. The wardrobes, being made of MDF and being highly susceptible to moisture were unfortunately already ‘blown out’ at the bottom and were therefore irreparable.
That set the tone for the rest of the week and it all went downhill from there…
The eldest pup had gone to school the next morning in a strange mood following the weekends events and he managed to break his glasses into several pieces whilst in a temper after a disagreement with a schoolmate. He was upbraided by his teacher and the principal and by the time he got home; he was very sheepish boy. He laid low for the next 24 hours before returning to his normal mischevious self.
Mid week, we received a call from Ms. Jerry minor, who at that time was in the US with a social theatre company and as part of her duties she’d been writing a short introduction to the show on the definition of feminism and wanted a few pointers from her Mother. She’d also been having some troubles with a broken tooth, which had caused the poor things cheek to swell up like a tennis ball. I checked the exorbitantly expensive health insurance we’d purchased and of course, it didn’t cover dental work. Ohh, the joy of it.
With the vain hope that things usually came in threes, I thought that we were probably ‘done’ this time around and so it was a very unwelcome surprise when the next day, we received a call from Jerry Juniors wife telling us that he’d gone down with an appendicitis. Thankfully, it had been possible for his delightful wife to get him into hospital and have it whipped out before it burst, but it had apparently been a close run thing. Finishing my phone call where I had received the good news about him, I heard an excited small dog yapping out in the garden from the direction of the chook run and with a quick expletive, I ran outside to see which dogs were loose. Jerry and George, were in their pen, contentedly gnawing on the bones I had left out for them earlier, so I knew it had to be Stampy; the whirlwind of a dog who has a delusional view of her ability to kill much larger creatures and most vehicles.
The by now frenzied yapping almost drowned out the sounds of the panicking chickens and it transpired that during my rushed round of animal feeding that morning; I had failed to secure the door of the pen properly and she’d stood on her hind legs and worried the door to the extent that the bolt had worked loose and allowed her into the doggy heaven of the chicken run. As I approached the presumed murder scene, Stampy proudly trotted out of the roost with a mouthful of multicoloured feathers. She did a cartoon double take when she saw me and turning in mid air, she dashed back into the hen house and tried to hide, but the girls were having none of it and they were squawking madly from their perches. Luckily, Stampy hadn’t managed to get a fatal grip on any of them but I knew they wouldn’t be laying any eggs for a while.
The usually indestructible Jerry minor was also stricken with the flu but he had been dosed up with drugs and had cried off school and had taken to his bed with computer games and mountains of snacks, so he was temporarily taken care of. I then ferried the youngsters to their respective school and daycare locations.
As luck would have it, pup #2, who is now four years old was being uncharacteristically ‘divine’ early on the Friday morning and was cheekily campaigning to be allowed to stay at home and ‘look after’ Jerry minor. He has both the bluest of eyes and the blondest of hair and does not fail to unleash both when he’s caught out and found to be in a behaviour deficit and he was turning them on for me like a spot light, in a bid to get his own way. I confess that whilst he’s massively cute, I am slightly immune to his Jedi master like charms; having been similarly gifted at his age and I had, in the past, pulled all of the emotional heart strings that could possibly be pulled. Before she left the country, Ms Jerry minor had been the target of pup # 2’s Jedi mind trick and he fluttered his baby blues at her as an excuse for being naughty. She pointed at herself saying “look, I’ve got those as well and it doesn’t work with me! The wry smile on the four year olds face when he was challenged told us that he knew he’d been well and truly busted. Needless to say, he went to school.
Summing up the week that evening as we reached for the gin bottle, we decided that things could have been a lot worse, we just couldn’t quite think of how… We were all looking forward to a holiday the following week, but I was quite nervous about what could happen in the meantime!