About our grandchildren mainly

Mrs C and I spent the best part of 5 days in London last weekend … a very
long weekend, staying with our daughter L and her family there. Time
passed quite slowly, as our granddaughter Mini, was poorly with a bad
cough, a fever and vomiting for 2-3 days. Fortunately she made a good
recovery, with the help of drinks and Calpol (despite vomiting most of
all these back up). One small blessing of all this was that her deafness
has improved … both of her middle ears were blocked up with fluid, which
has been the case for 3-4 weeks. Perhaps her retching had opened up the
internal drainage tubes.

Her teacher had told her mum L. that Mini appeared detached from what was
going on in the classroom. L. took her along to the GP who said little
could be done for the middle ear congestion, apart from using some Olbas
oil from time to time. In days gone by, I used to prescribe decongestant
+ an antihistamine mixtures for kids her age, but now GPs and pharmacists
are banned from giving such medicines to children under 6 years of age.
I wonder why? This seems to be daft to me, when such medicines can help
relieve deafness and can avoid children being sent for drainage ops
(having grommets inserted).

One funny story about all this … L. asked Mini if her teacher had noticed
how deaf she was. Initially Mini said: “No”, but a few seconds later she
said: “Yes, … but it doesn’t matter … she was just telling us what to do.”

Yesterday we spent the best part of the day in South Nottingham, looking
after our two other grandchildren, A and JJ, while their mum and dad were
at work. Both kids were at home, on half-term holiday from school. They’d
had an exciting few days earlier this week at EuroDisney near Paris.
Their parents felt tired out by the end of their stay, due to all the
activities (and late bedtimes for the children). I think I would have
felt tired if I’d been there, tired of seeing so many Disney characters
every day. Anyway, the children were still feeling excited by their stay,
and talked a lot about what / who they’d seen.

Today, we did a bit of Xmas shopping (we bought two Trunki suitcases for
A and JJ, and then we had a blitz on clearing out our garage of all
sorts of junk. We filled up two dustbins with the stuff (both the
recycling and the ordinary bins). I put more photos of the kids up on
my Flickr site, and later on, we sat down to watch some telly up to
about 10.00pm old time … old Summer time, as the clocks are going back
an hour tonight.

Tomorrow, I will have a go at trying out a new anti-snoring device. This
appliance more or less locks the upper and lower teeth together at night.
I’m interested to see if this will work for me (or should I say, work for
Mrs C, as I’m generally not aware when I snore at night). In the past
few years, I’ve been using a pliable plastic insert, which helps a
little (according to Mrs C). It tends to fall out of my mouth, however.
One morning I couldn’t find it anywhere, until I found it stuck on the
top of my head, like a limpet. :)

We plan to have an early lunch / brunch tomorrow, as we’ve booked to see
a performance of "Don Giovanni" at the Broadway Cinema (which starts at
midday). This was broadcast live from The Met today … we’ll be seeing
the action replay tomorrow … it should be good. Mozart is our favourite
composer as far as opera is concerned. In the evening, I reckon we’ll
be watching highlights of “The X Factor” on Virgin Media’s catch-up
service … we only watch the actual songs and the judges’ comments – we
skip all the rest, as we do more or less with “Strictly Come Dancing”,
cutting out all the padding and the silly build-up to finding out who’s
staying or leaving the series. There are better things we can do with
the time, such as watching other programmes on catch-up (on the TV and
radio). As regards the latter, there’s an interesting History
series on BBC Radio 4 at present, all about how Germany came to be
unified as one country, (and what it was like before this happened)… http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016btb4/episodes/player

Talk to you soon, folks.