Alone and palely loitering...

Trust the spud to make the most of being ill. He's getting a lot of time on the sofa at the moment, lying down feebly, drinking milk from a bottle and watching reruns of Chuggington and Charlie and Lola until his eyeballs drop out.

His eyeballs are (so far) about the only things free of spots, spots having now appeared on the soles of his feet and the outside of his eyelids. We had a surreal night - around midnight he started shaking uncontrollably, although he didn't have a whisper of a fever. He was piling on the blankets and raving a bit (although to be fair, that's pretty normal) so after some fruitless searching on the NHS website for the cause of cold shivers in children I rang the NHS Direct. This hotline will give you a doctor on the phone or get you a housecall in an emergency and I just wanted some advice.

However, the spud, never one to shirk dramatics, managed to conjure up a rash on his shoulders, some vomiting and a temp of 40.5 conveniently while the doctor was on the phone and suddenly they were shipping off an ambulance.

When it's 2am and someone tells one they're sending an ambulance for one's son, suddenly one's intellect is wrestling uncontrollably with one's emotions. My intellect was picking her nails in the doorway and quietly damning the waste of NHS resources while my Mummy brain was quivering and shouting in the middle of the room like a very loud bowl of jelly. It's just that once the big 'M' word has been let out of the box it's kinda hard to put it back in without some serious thinking.

The ambulance men came and were very nice about us wasting their time. They offered to take him in but on the basis that hospitals are full of sick people we kept him home. We dosed him with Calpol and left him naked on his bed but for a sheet. Around 5am he appeared in our bed clutching his sheet and demanding a cuddle and 7am he was up for a pee.

Oh, he's fine; he was rampaging around the flat on his scooter, his bike and his feet laying waste to it for a few hours; now he's pulling the 'I'm more sicker' card and being all pale and interesting on the sofa with his bottle, something I feel like doing myself at the moment.

I suspect, however, that 10:30 on a Sunday morning is a bit early to be hanging around with Uncle Vodka.