Oh and the other thing I forgot...

Childhood illness = a complete forfeit of the right to sleep, whether you be ill or not.

2.11am a miserable, deeply upset and confused Noo wakes and cries for... well, it was about 3.45 when I went to bed. Then she woke up again at around 5.30, then 6.

All not made any easier by giving her a lovely snug breastfeed to help her nod off and to soothe her throat, only to have her react to the cold medicine we'd plunged down her gullet earlier and puke up about 4 oz of milk (aaaand an unknown quantity of medicine, thereby precluding any chance of giving her any more) all over the bed, and me. I have a feeling that changing the sheets at 3am is a skill I will develop.

Reading her to sleep is an action which I am very happy to have succeeded in developing. I read to her in a quiet but expressive voice (I'm not trying to give her the impression that stories are dull) and eventually she relaxes enough to just drop off. I had to buy another fairy tales book after reading through the glorious edition of the Brothers Grimm that Yoz 'n' Bob bought for Nory 5 times. Yes, the original stories are fascinating. No, they do not get fundamentally boring but there's only so many times I can read about that bloody sweet bread covered cottage in the woods. The archetypes in the stories are fascinating. Stepmothers are treated universally as evil minded bitches, and God is an ever present figure. The most interesting stories are the freaky weird ones you never hear about these days. For example, "the Story of the youth who went out to learn what fear was" - if that was read aloud to children, I imagine rather alot of sleepless nights (it would make a great horror film. And I'm not joking). "Godfather Death" stsartys with an astounding passage where a man rejects God as the Godfather to his child because he doesn't accept as a pious man God's reasonable spread of richness and poverty, and he accepts death because before him, all men are equal. "The Star money" is equally strange (and short) but the most screwy one in the volume is "The Story of Schlauraffen Land" which is frankly, an acid trip. This Gutenberg volume shows you just how many more stories they wrote than are widely known now and I must say, I'm fascinated to read the very unknown ones, like "The Jew among Thorns". Who knows what on earth it's like?