What a night I had last night

03:05:2004
It's got to rank as one of the worst ever.
What do the following have in common?

A sick child (nausea and stomach pains)
Obsessively going over the parts of your life that you consider to have fucked up.
The need to pee every 20 minutes.
Catalogueing a long list of one's peers whom you consider to have done better in life than you, through a combination of luck and hard work.
A sick child (diarrhoea).
Bleakly considering one's options given one's likely remaining years on Earth.
Red, itchy skin.
Wind (of the unpleasant, bodily type).

The answer: any one of them can disrupt a night's sleep. Well guess what? I got the whole lot last night. Through a combination of drinking Dr ---y's chinese herb potion just before bed (not a good idea), the kids getting the tummy bug that's been going round and some unwelcome pieces of news concerning how well certain people about my age are doing, I had myself a nice little rollercoaster of a night.

The only two mitigating factors were that a) I didn't start obsessively going over all the potential romances I have buggered up in my life through a combination of inexperience and lack of insight or skills concerning the opposite sex (a real sleep-killer, I can tell you) and b) I could still find solace in the fact that I have a wife and kids who love me.

However the above factors were not the top things in my mind when after just managing to drift off, ---y came in sobbing that she had a dry mouth and felt sick. ----i took her to the toilet but ---y had problems actually purging and instead of vomiting simply screamed into the toilet for a few minutes, thereby waking --m.

---y crawled into our bed with ----i and I took her place in her bed, where I scratched, farted, got up to pee, introspected, scratched, got up to pee again, until finally I managed to drift off again.
I was woken by an incredibly disgusting stench. --m had climbed out of his cot and was bravely trying to get back to sleep in the bed with me despite something obviously bothering him in the nappy department. I could hardly breathe because of the smell and since ----i was spending the night holding ---y's hair up so she could scream into the toilet I stripped --m down and discovered a very runny poo that had gone all down one leg. To his credit --m didn't give me any trouble as I wiped him up, put a new nappy on and dressed him in some clean pyjamas. It seemed all he wanted to do was get back to bed, so both he and I hunkered down in ---y's bed and we slept until he shoved me out an indeterminate time later.
Eventually dawn broke and ----i took the kids downstairs while I had an hour's blessed extra sleep, all on my own in my own bed.

Is there a punchline to this one? not really. ---y is off school and --m is still crapping beyond the boundaries of his nappy. Good thing is I've stopped obsessing about the imaginary perfect lives of all the highly successful 'other people'. There are people out there with hideous diseases and without a pot to piss in so maybe I should just shut up and stop whingeing.


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