highlights of September school holidays

Its been a ripper of a school holidays, let me tell you. We had some grand plans for the second week, but the first week was a take-it-as-it-comes sort of plan, which suddenly included during the first week, the mustering (far easier as only one water left in the paddock) of steers, and sale of two decks of them.

It was while we were doing this muster that we first noticed a little rash appearing on Georgie's face, and put it down to contact with something a bit nasty.  By the time we finished with the cattle, and kid sleepovers at Granma's it was Wednesday.  After she got out of bed that morning, I rang the doctors for an urgent appointment. Posted a pic on Instagram and some good people there diagnosed it before I reached the helpful and effervescent final year med student doing prac at the surgery. SHINGLES. She googled it for me, and we both agreed on the defined location of the rash. Off armed with a script for anti viral medication and some googling of my own to gauge the contagiousness of it to other people.

She was very stoic, and apart from some panadol for headache/fever, she got by with just a cool damp washer on her face and swoollen eye.The tablets she were given were thankfully dissolvable (still not very pleasant) but of all the kids to get this, and not send mother crazy, this was the right one!!

   

Husband squeezed another day of cattle work out of us when Georgie was recovered (just some dry flaky skin remaining of the rash) so I set of most optimistically in my crisp stripy shirt.  Wasn't so crisp by the end of the day. But still, one can still take time to enjoy the rather show off sunset, there have been a few of those the past week.

    

There's been time to enjoy the new pool (although its still not quite warm enough for mum to consider!) and some flowering around the garden, despite its dryness.

Classiness entered an all new high here, running out of tissues. Enter new invention: putting toilet roll inside the empty tissue box. Whilst flossy was dealing with shingles I was dealing with germs passed on by my brother, with an annoying cold I am yet to fully shake. However, on the bright side, my YELLOW bike was finally assembled and it is indeed very comfortable to treddle about on. Pity about the compromised lung capacity as I cough up a lung every morning. Tis a fun way to start the day.

We had grand plans of an outing tomorrow, movie and maccas and grocery shopping, just so there was some excitement for the kids during the holidays. Unfortunately....

That is indeed the spotty back of an immunised-but-never-had-chicken-pox boyo. Yes, you can catch chicken pox from shingles, but you can't catch shingles.

Someone hand me the wine bottle, I think I need to take up drinking.