The Family Dog portrait

You know the saying 'woke up at the crack of dawn'? Well, this morning we were up 90 minutes before the crack of dawn and I'm tellin' ya - at 5.45am, when the sky is pitch black and Ferry Road is quiet of all traffic and you've had close to 2 hours sleep in total, it's easy to feel like you're living in some kind of post apocalyptic hell.

Add to that 2 really grumpy and possibly quite ill children and it would be easy to stamp the whole day with a massive 'THIS IS GOING TO BE A SHIT DAY' stamp and be done with it.

Fortunately, today had already decided to stamp itself with a 'I AM GOING TO BE BEAUTIFUL' stamp so the seratonin levels picked themselves up and despite having 2 really grumpy and possibly quite ill children, we managed to pick it all up and have a nice day.

Saying that - we had quite a bit of adversity to overcome to get to this glorious achievement. Arlo spent most of the day acting like Kevin the Teenager, he wouldn't eat anything (but asked for his Kinder Egg at least 89 million times), he would barely crack a smile and he spent the entire day complaining of some kind of ailment - one minute a sore throat, then a sore head, then sore legs, then he just complained in mumbles. We'd stopped listening by then.

Ida spent the entire day shouting at us in furious tones and raging grunts and groans. She's gone beyond the point of frustration and not being able to speak and is taking it out on us at every opportunity. We had a laugh about the days where we used to say we couldn't believe how mellow and content she was, back when she couldn't really do much at all (ah, so feckless we were). Nowadays, you have to duck every time she's holding an object for fear she's going to twat you one with it. It would appear that 'bubble', 'nana', 'ball', and 'Dada' are no longer all the words she needs to tell us what she wants.

So, despite all that (and the fact that we had to do a supermarket shop) we had a nice day. Got home, collapsed in a heap and had a bit of quiet time. I caught Arlo looking in the mirror inside his mouth at the end of the day and when I asked for a look too I realised that his tonsils are bright red and swollen.

Oops. It would seem that Kevin wasn't making up ailments to get out of eating his lunch after all...