Welcome to autumn. It’s still stinking hot and yet, before you have even started looking at your winter woolies, cold and flu season has hit your family like a sledge hammer while you weren’t looking. This week I must have seen around a dozen tired, miserable, runny nosed, pink cheeked babies and toddlers who have coughed and cried intermittently all night.

Inevitably the little one will get better in a flash, with the virus leaving the station as quickly as it arrived. In its wake is left a mum (and often dad too) whose lack of sleep, care of the midnight calls of sick junior has left them a train wreck.

Mum usually sniffs and wipes her blood shot eyes, completely forgetting to mention that she has a raging dose of the very cold that has claimed her nights and had her running all night to hold someone’s head over the toilet while they throw up. She’s so tired she almost forgot she too has her very own sore throat and headache. After all, this stage life is one headachey blur and who can tell where exhaustion ends and an infection begins?

I bang on about sleep deprivation a lot but in a nutshell, sleep deprivation for mum has flow-on effects. Your immune system for starters takes a hiding. You’ll also start snapping at the kids and hubby, then feel guilty and miserable. You’ll invade your pantry and start eating the kids left over Halloween junk food you’d hidden since October- which you would never do in your right mind unless your brain had gone into melt down.

Time to take EMERGENCY ACTION;
1. Call in the big guns. Mum, girlfriends and hubby can all be told they have to hold the fort for a few hours a day so you can hit the sack. 
2. Dinner will be baked beans on toast until further notice.  
3. You will discover you are not indispensible at work as you CALL IN SICK and sleep.
4. You will go on your knees to Day care and BEG for an extra day just for this week so you can recover.

Soon… more tips and tricks on looking after yourself when your little ones get sick. For now, sleep tight.