I'm quitting my day job....

The trouble with having an army of kids is when one gets sick it sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events which results in me going temporarily insane through lack of sleep.
Our middle child is a bug magnet. If I didn’t know better I’d swear he was deliberately kissing snotty-nosed girls to get off school for a few days to watch the Fireman Sam marathon on Cartoon Network. He’s always the first man to fall. He deals with his sickness by boking, mostly. On the nights he’s sick I can be found standing in the hall sleeping with my head resting atop a mop handle. There really is no point in sleeping while lying down. It just heightens the pain.
Next to succumb is usually Daniel. When he’s sick – regardless of variety of bug – it flares up his asthma so I spend the night ferrying basins of boiling water up and down the stairs, administering inhalers at hourly intervals and reading him books about aliens and dinosaurs.
Next to hit the decks is Finn the Destroyer. From the moment he feels that lurgy hit until the moment he feels better he screams. The ear-piercing wailing can last for four days and four nights. I still wake in the night in a cold sweat recalling the time he had chickenpox. That child screamed for two weeks. He screamed about being sick, screamed about the spots, about the itching, screamed about the application of cream, about the non-application of cream. The husband and I doubted we would ever smile again.
Our baby girl is usually the last of the lot to fall ill. She expresses her displeasure at being sick by refusing to sleep.
Not A wink.
For weeks.
She is the sole reason I look and feel 70-years old today.
When the kids are done with the bug and the puking and the screaming and the not sleeping I get a super-concentrated combined version of the lurgy bug, which is always something I look forward to.
And when the tables are turned it’s a whole different ball game. No matter how much I shout for their assistance in the night they conveniently sleep through my pleas. I could actually die for the want of a hot lemon and honey drink or someone to read me a book about aliens stealing underpants at 3am. I doubt they would care, or notice until their demands for seven different brands of breakfast cereals mixed together in the one bowl went unanswered the next morning.
And no matter happens in the night and no matter if I can count actual sleeping times in minutes instead of hours I still have to get up and go to work in the morning. Sometimes this is a hindrance, sometimes a help.
For example I was at a meeting recently with an incredibly boring and terribly obnoxious man. I caught sight of a large goldfish in a tank just behind his head. As he ranted on the giant goldfish seemed to be mocking him, opening and closing his fishy mouth in time with his conversings. This may well have been a sleep-deprived hallucination. None the less it made me laugh and fret less about losing an hour of my life I’ll never get back.
It may have been sleep deprivation that also pushed me to think about going back to university. It may well have been lack of shuteye that propelled me into a chair at a careers advisor’s office. God knows I would do quite literally anything for a sit down and a cup of tea.
The nice lady asked me questions and tapped the answers into her computer, then got me to do some sort of psychological word quiz which would profile my true character. I could have really saved her the bother and told her I was a ‘neurotic, knackered, super-hypochondriac with an unhealthy obsession with Harry Potter’. But she insisted the quiz would be able to tell me which career would best suit me. I sat like a fool and circled words like ‘team player’, ‘emotional’ and ‘reserved’ thinking the smart computer would tell me that I was perfectly matched to ‘journalism’ and hence the last 15 years of my existence where not a total waste of time.
She tapped my answers into the computer, looked at me, looked at the sheet, printed out the results and handed them to me.
Apparently I’ve got a ‘supporter’ personality.
And my ideal occupation is ‘funeral director’.