Ill children.

This has got to be quick and to the point as I have an ill child. A child who has had a temperature of 102.2 today.

It's a very sobering thing when you're child is ill with a temperature. Teething and ear ache and ailments are easily Calpoled and forgotten, but a temperature means something very different. I have a friend whose son is regulalry soaring in the hudreds with his temperature and has had fits and god knows what else because of it, and she says she's so used to it now it doesn't phase her. It phases me. I want my daughter to get back to normal. I carry around this horrible feeling of panic and "what if"... NHS Direct have been great as has the Out of Hours doctor, but there's a big, scaredy, juvenile part of me that wants all these people to say that I need to take her to hospital, not becasue I like the drama and fancy a trip, but so that it's someone elses responsibility as well as ours. Is that wrong? Does everyone feel like that or is it just me being pathetic and childish?

Anyhoo, I now want to go and press my daughter's forehead and force liquids of any description down her throat. I don't care if she's sleeping, to me, dehydration can happen in a second, that's how ridiculous and out of touch with reality I am when it comes to my daughter's and temperatures. I also want to wrap her up in anything I can find and give her a hot water bottle, constantly fighting that mothering urge that to me seems so natural, but actually only makes the whole thing worse. But flinging open the window and getting her naked just seems so opposite to that which I am programmed to do.

Off I trot. Please let this all be gone by tomorow so I can go back to being useless but thinking I am doing well and the children can irritate me to the point of insanity and I can complain once more without touching wood before I do so.