Zoe returned from her one-night rainforest education centre excursion, and bravely showed me the blood on her sock from a leech. (They had a bit of rain up there, which of course brings the leeches out more.) You learn something everyday, you know. Apparently one feed of blood can last a leech 18 months - she figured the one that the teacher got off her looked like he could go twice that! But I gather she didn't cry, just asked the teacher to get it off for her, and was, unusually, more concerned about the state of her clothes.

"Will you be able to get the blood out of my sock, Mum?"

I was impressed that she handled this little interaction with nature so well. I've known adults to scream hysterically when they got a leech on them.

But then, the bubble burst. "I've got a spider on my leg!" she cried, as she came downstairs after getting changed into shorts, and showing me this little creature attached to the outside of her upper thigh.

Not a spider, I informed her. A tick.

That shattered her. Suddenly it was very very itchy, and one tired and emotional post-camp girl couldn't hold back the tears, even when I successfully removed it using, for the first time, a special tick removing tool (like a tiny plastic crowbar) that I'd bought some time ago from the vets!! She was too fragile then to go to her tennis lesson - (Woe is me.. it's sooo itchy!!!!) and we would have been late by then anyway - so I went the TV Distraction route for my poor tired and emotional girl. (It has left an area of red, and itched like crazy yesterday, but this morning it has finally eased a bit, and she went off to school without asking for bite cream. I hope she hasn't had a bad day with it.)

Meantime, same day, Cait had come home from school holding one eye gingerly closed. At sport she'd copped a kicked basketball (yep..kicked) in the eye as she was bending down to retrieve another ball. More dust and dirt than anything; she'd had no warning and not closed her eye. A shower to rinse her eye out fixed that up. But she also had to wash out some gunk that some guy in her year put in her hair. (A Year 9, boy to girl term of endearment perhaps?)

Marc had been out in the field for work that day, and he got stung three times on the face by a wasp. (Or three wasps..who knows.) Lucky he is not allergic, but it hurt like hell at the time, apparently.

Later that night at Touch, just after he made the pass for a teammate to make the winning try, he kept running and went over on his ankle on the edge of the cricket pitch that bordered the end of the touch field, taking out a couple of big blokes standing facing the other way, one of whom subsequently fell on him, sandwiching his head between one of them and the concrete pitch. (He did the ice, and strapping thing that night - on the ankle, not the head - and then went bike riding Thursday morning. Funny how his ankle was a bit sore after that, but I don't think it's too serious. Mind you I don't think the bang to the head has knocked any more sense into him.)

And to include one more family member into the mix, I'd spoken to Alison on Tuesday night, away on her school excursion in Sydney, and she told me that she'd thrown up in the bus on the way down on Monday! She never gets car or bus sick! Most of it was in the aisle, she said. Errrr yuk. God, I pity the poor teacher who had to help her clean it up. (Yet she wouldn't take the car sick tablets I got my Mum to buy on her way to meeting up with her at their Darling Harbour food hall dinner last night. Which I found out about later. Which she will get an earful for when she gets home tonight, because WHY WOULDN'T YOU JUST TAKE A DAMN TABLET IN CASE IT HAPPENS AGAIN INSTEAD OF BEING SURE IT WAS ''JUST A ONE OFF'' ?)

Maybe it's a good thing I didn't go out riding on Wednesday!

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* Not my photos.. stolen as usual from a google image search.

Labels: daily, wtf