Does parental experience count for anything?

You'd think that 13 years of being a parent would count for something. It appears not. That is why, with Husband away this week, the following things happened.

1. I was pondering to myself how some things do get easier, and reminiscing silently how one of the children always used to be ill whenever Husband went away, and how once I even booked a doctor's appointment in advance - which I did then need (or perhaps I was just proving my point), but how they seemed to have grown out of being ill so much. This is known as TEMPTING FATE, and as a parent, you don't do it. We all know that. It's in Chapter 1 of all the baby books.
2. I have not had my antennae tuned recently. We all know that parents need fully-functioning antenna, which can pick up any hint of a "wouldn't you just know it" story before it becomes reality. For the week Husband is away, I am working on Monday and Tuesday, and the boys are off school on Thursday and Friday. This leaves Wednesday as the one day for me, me, me. So when 6-yo creeps into my bed at 5.00am on Wednesday morning, complaining of a tummy ache, why do I not see where this is going? Why do I operate my mind-over-matter strategy on her, saying "I'll get the bucket and we'll put it by the bed, but YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BE SICK"? And then in the morning, when she hasn't been sick and says she's feeling a bit better, but has a temperature of a little over 99, why do I optimistically say "oh, we'll take it again in an hour... it'll probably go down... people often have a slightly raised temperature first thing in the morning" and not remember that that's just when you're ovulating, which, at 6 years old, she probably isn't?
3. When we are driving home from taking the boys to school, and 6-yo announces "I'm going to be sick", I reply "but we're nearly home, very very nearly home, I can see the house, just hold on ONE minute". Yup. That's what I said. Even the most inept parent knows that when a child says "I'm going to be sick", the correct answer isn't any sentence including the words "just hold on". We all know that stopping the car is the only workable strategy at this point, and who cares about the neighbour's lawn?
4. I didn't have a receptacle of any description to hand in the car. Any decent parent has a plastic bag or two in the car, don't they? In the few seconds available to me, I looked at the box of tissues, and wondered if she could be sick tidily into the little window at the top of it. I even looked at her adored dry erase board, and wondered if she could hold it horizontal and keep it level, as a sort of vomit-receiving tray (though I knew this would be cruel beyond measure - she loves that dry erase board so much). So as I sped up the road, the best I could do was to say "open the window - if you're being sick, do it out of the window", forgetting that those stupid electric windows in the back of the car don't open all the way down.

So serves me right, eh? Forty-five minutes wiping vomit off the inside of the window, the inside of the door, the seat belt, the car seat, the car seat cover, the floor, and out of the retracting cup-holder and all its niftily designed little hinges for which no doubt some studious Japanese designer received great credit from his superiors, because none of them thought "this flips shut very neatly, but I wonder how easy it would be to clean vomit out of all the small crevices".

But there's one thing I HAVE learnt as a parent, and it is this. There is NO SHAME in putting the tv on when you have a poorly child, in order to buy you time to write a blog post. So I guess 13 years do count for something.

[Stephen Hawking, by the way. The bad taste joke in the last post...]