Excuse my french, but it’s sod’s law if you have something important scheduled and you have children they decide THAT is the time they will get sick. Take the run up to The Letterman Co launch for example. Every last second of nanny time and nap time had been mapped out. And then along comes Captain Fever who decides to pay a visit to the big kid! Kids also seem to choose to get sick right around the time you plan a rare night out with the girls (hello Prosecco old friend!).

Me & my bro designing the website. Wearing ‘Sista’ t-shirt from blogzine Selfish Mother  .  Profits from sales of Mother designs go to Women for Women International –  an amazing charity that helps women in 8 war-torn regions rebuild their lives through training programs.

So, 3am Sunday morning and still slightly pickled, I am awoken by my eldest screaming and hallucinating with a 40 degree fever.  Two days later things have progressed to the point where I find him screaming in pain and pointing to the right side of his groin. A panicked call to 111 decides it’s best to cart him off to A&E as it might be appendicitis.

Unless you’ve got kids it’s probably hard to imagine just how difficult it can be to put two children in a car in a hurry. It reminds me of that puzzle where you have to get the fox, the chicken and the bag of corn across the river without one of them eating the other! Except it’s trying to get buggy, nappies and general child survival kit into the car whilst a) ensuring children don’t peg it down the road (the youngest kid decided to make a dash for it whilst I ws fielding his sick brother into the car. Fortunately he was apprehended by a passerby) and b) getting a child rigid and writhing in pain into a car seat with just a bit of help from a passing runner and by opening the car door with your foot.

Of course 15 minutes after checking in, the patient – who had previously been screaming the house down in pain – was now happily running around the waiting room, making Mommy look like an overdramatic psychotic momma bear! Daddy, who’d practically run from central London, was none too impressed!

This isn’t the first – and probably won’t be the last – time we’ll incur illnesses at inopportune times. My first big presentation at Barbour in front of about 100 delegates from around the world coincided with my eldest getting chicken pox. The same child got a splinter in his finger when I had a major work deadline. And no, we couldn’t get it out, the doctor wouldn’t take it (some stupid health & safety restrict probably involving GPs and sharp instruments), so we ended up in Accident & Emergency – for a SPLINTER!! It took one week of prep, two nurses, bubbles, the iPad, me AND my husband to get the buggering thing out!

On the latest jaunt to hospital we were however the latest patients to be filmed for Channel 4’s ’24 Hours in A&E’. So if you see a frazzled momma betting her husband £5 she can get her ‘pain in the butt’ son to pee in a pot on the show this autumn – that’s me!