Last week started off wonderfully on the back of a Sunday spent at Betchworth. Getting out of London was a liberation.

We came home laden with Cecily’s sensational dairy-free chocolate cupcakes. Then Marta’s brother Juan and his wife Teresa arrived with more jamon. We are all going to get fat.

Isita went into GOSH on Tuesday for a routine test on her kidneys, but developed a high temperature so they kept her in. Juan and Teresa turned into emergency babysitters for Jamie.
On Wednesday they transferred Isita to Saint Mary’s Paddington. We had a little room with a window that actually opened (fresh air – bliss!) and a view if the canal boats in Paddington Basin and Thomas Heatherwick’s rolling bridge. We watched it curl and uncurl like an insect’s tail, as workmen fiddled with its workings.

Of course we had hoped to get out after two days, but she was diagnosed with an adenovirus, which is nothing special, but her temperature was still up. So we postponed the magician and told all her friends they would have to come another day. 

I baked a cake in the evening and Jamie decorated it while having breakfast. The staff on the ward all got together to sing happy birthday. Marta’s godmother Tia Fernanda came, and so did Isita’s godfather Bennet, and Iona with a huge retriever pup teddy, now christened Diggy. We had to ferry suitcases of presents back and forth to the hospital. 

But for her bald head, you could hardly imagine our chirpy daughter was sick. Even so, she had another transfusion and stayed two more nights. Marta bore the brunt of it, because on Friday I had a proposal to write for work, then on Saturday I took Jamie to Shropshire where we fired an air rifle at a target stuck on an upturned wheelbarrow. And that, Miss, is why I didn’t write the blog all week.