I Wish I Was Ern Malley

I'm definitely of the Mary Poppins Spoonful of Sugar School when it comes to giving medicine to kids, especially since artificial sweeteners make the medicine even worse than normal. For the last couple of weeks our children have had a really rotten cold which made them all cough terribly and generally be very miserable indeed. Calvin ended up with a chest infection that meant that he had to take paracetamol (for the fever) and antibiotics. This is no trivial thing because getting nearly-three-year-old Calvin ended up with his two parents holding him down and pouring it down his throat or, in one case, me sitting on him and pouring it down his throat, take-it-it's-good-for-you-style. This is because the medicine tastes vile . Of cource, medicine always has, but at least before pharmaceutical companies would sweeten it with sugar, or Mary Poppins would. But because everyone's obsessed with diets and all that crap the medicine has to be sugar-free. Which means that instea...

It's been a long time between posts. Work has kept me busy with late nights and weekends. The kids have kept me busy as always and frankly, this is about the first time I've had some time where I've felt like writing anything. … Well, that was worth waiting for wasn’t it? Anyway, I have a bit of time now because my wife is watching the finale of Survivor and, because we're a couple of weeks behind the USA, we already know what happened. Rita wants to see how the whole thing plays out but, not being a huge fan of ‘reality’ TV, I'm not going to worry about watching the whole two hours. Nevertheless, I've enjoyed watching some of the show over the last couple months. Rita and I have been following Terry, mainly because he—along with Shane—has seemed the most honorable. (Shane was weird, so we didn't like him as much). According to Rita this has made him one of the show's most popular competitors—with the audience. It's nice to know that integrity ...