Reasons to be stressful, part three

• Littlest has insisted on a goldfish. Long-term readers of this blog will know how that always goes. 'Rosie' - the most antagonistic goldfish I have ever seen -  commenced her inevitable swim toward death in our home at the weekend. I have yet to understand why people claim to find fish so stress-relieving. To my mind, Rosie moves in a manner that suggests a good deal of suppressed anger.
  
  
• Night-times - and their accompanying wakenings in order to replace Eldest's orthotic foot and leg splints - have begun to take on a hallucinatory quality. (The child is a miniature Houdini, who can undo 18 straps of heavy-duty velcro in the dark without a sound, and without even opening her eyes.) Mr Coffee and I take it in turns to set our alarms at roughly 2-hour intervals, but the mind works in strange ways at 3am. Last night I heard the alarm, woke up, dutifully put it back on for two hours later and then went back to sleep, fully convinced that I had set myself an alarm in the middle of the night solely as a reminder to set myself an alarm in the middle of the night.
  
  
• The garden is turning into something worthy of its own strange dream. The thick spiky hedge rivals the thicket from Sleeping Beauty; the gardener who spoke with such promise of his chainsaw never arrived. The courgette plants that my mother's friend coddled into life for us whilst we were on holiday have actually shrunk since July. We have not harvested a single red tomato from about 15 plants. The peppers gave up growing several months ago, having proudly reached two inches high. It rains. It rains. The strawberry plants are sending runners out into the cracks in the patio.
  
  
• In November, Eldest goes into hospital to have a large amount of surgery on her hips, legs and feet. Yes, I did just throw that in amongst a load of stuff about fish and strawberry plants. We will spend two weeks in hospital before returning home for a period of rehab which could last up to a year. The decision to go ahead with the surgery - which is intended to stave off the loss of mobility that  children with increased spasticity experience as they grow - has not been easy, but nor has it been a decision we have made alone. Eldest wants to keep walking. Her bravery makes us proud. And it makes getting up at all times of the night a price worth paying.