My dentist's secretary phoned yesterday to confirm today's appointment. I knew then, that because I would be charged a missed appointment fee, because they had bothered to reconfirm, because I had already postponed it once and was dreading it for all the impending jangling pain that renewing a filling would entail, that a spanner would be put in the works of that appointment.
It came, 3 hours later, in the shape of our elder son who repeatedly threw up on the way home from football practice - in someone else's car. As if that wasn't bad enough, said car was fairly posh with leather seats and the sort of owner who has probably vacuumed and polished it more than once on a Sunday morning.
I had taken my son and his friend to football training and the idea was that the friend's dad would bring them both home. It's a fairly new arrangement but benefits us both. I could crack on with making dinner (& doing some online 'research', of course!)
So after apologising and putting the freezing cold poorly boy in the bath and clearing up after him another two times before plonking him in our bed, banishing the husband to the spare room and steeling myself for a night of non-sleep, the non-sleep ensued. I won't go into the gory details but the poor child was up several times before 2 a.m. and then we were all woken by the automatic 'it's a school day' internal alarm clock.
Texts were sent, school was phoned and before long, a neighbour had taken younger son to school; said school had been phoned to forewarn them they'd be at least one child less for the Christmas lunch that day & appointments cancelled - except the pearly white one!
Then it snowed - but not enough to keep us in. Another near-miss thwarted. Along with the snow, an angel descended on my doorstep begging a favour. My neighbour needed me to babysit while she went to her son's Christmas nativity & she'd just found out that young siblings weren't allowed to attend. So I looked after her 18-month-old & managed to stop her from drawing on my furniture and sticking all my nearly-written Christmas cards together. In return, because her clan had just recovered from a week's lurgy, she didn't mind looking after poorly boy who told her where the teabags lived and, thankfully, wasn't at all ill in my absence. Meanwhile, I was injected, drilled and refilled to tunes from Classic FM.
And you know, the whole experience was fairly painless - aside from the bill. 90 quid for one tooth to be filled (with the white stuff not that old amalgam poison) and a scale & polish. No idea whether or not that was good value but after the injection, I felt not a thing and I'm happy to pay good money for that kind of non-pain.
So, here's my first posting about a potentially calamitous day that ended up not being and here's to the sisterhood for helping each other out when dire straits approach!
P.S. We all went on to get that horrid tummy bug - found out later it was norovirus.
