Lurgy

F's favourite toy is BunBun.

BunBun is a stuffed rabbit her godmother L gave her when she was born. Through some mysterious process of elimination, BunBun became pretty much the only stuffed toy F plays with. She's not really into stuffed toys generally, she prefers cars and lego right now. But BunBun goes everywhere with her. BunBun has her own chair, gets to share F's food, goes to Dagis with her, sleeps with her at night (or else) and has had to be physically prevented on occasion from sharing baths.

BunBun is, as a result, filthy.

Nearly two years of being dragged over playground floors or rubbed into breakfast cereal turned BunBun from a nice fluffy beige to stinky kind of grey. With occasional blue paint dots, god knows from where. But having taken on board that BunBun doesn't like getting wet, F point blank and screamingly refused to let her go and wash.

Mummy had a plan. Buy a second, identical BunBun from the toyshop down the road. Then we could swap them round while original BunBun hung out to dry.

Of course this didn't work. New Imposter BunBun was the wrong colour and scent, still being fluffy, beige and not smelling like a shoe. I'm not stupid, F seemed to say, thrusting this pod-person version away angrily. Get me the real deal.

I tell you this story so I can segue into another, which is that I've finally collected the full Big Five of infantile secretions. Poo, wee, dribble and nasal mucus I've had in spades for ages. Now my Spotted Guide is complete with the long-awaited addition of vomit.

I don't know what kind of vomit bug only strikes at night, punctually at eleven o' clock every night for half a week. F caught it, presumably from the plague pit that masquerades as Dagis. She stopped eating during the day, pretty much, which is extremely unlike her. And then started spewing what little she'd had over her sheets in the night.

Ironically, PseudoBunBun caught it first, which wasn't a problem. Then Original BunBun the following night, and even F agreed that sick was a smell too far for the poor creature. So come that midnight, having just mopped the flat (I'd tried to carry F through to the bathroom when I heard the sickup begin, which resulted in something like a Marx Brothers soda siphon gag being played out through our hallway. Plenty of gagging, anyway), I found myself washing BunBun by hand in the sink.

It's a morbid process, hand washing a beloved soft toy. Wringing the tiny furry creature out in the bubbles felt like disposing of an unnecessary cat, per some villainous landlord in a Victorian melodrama. My moustache isn't really the right variety for twirling, sadly, otherwise I'd have been doing that as I hung the macabre bodies out to dry on a makeshift gibbet. "Hang! Hang!" F said, pointing at them the following day. Good that she got into the spirit of things.

Half a week later, F is totally well again. Or well enough to cheerfully catch a new cold from Dagis, anyway. She's doing catch up eating (two hours of breakfast today, remarkably) and ruthlessly putting us through our paces. We're both zonked out, it's our turn with the bug. No vomiting for us, just exhaustion and (for me at least) a bizarre collection of muscle aches and pains that leave me creeping round the flat pathetically.

Both BunBuns remain clean and well.

*Late footnote - V read this and felt I hadn't done her role in the whole Regurge Crisis sufficient justice. This is true, I didn't mention her at all for some reason. Maybe because she spent most of it actually covered head-to-foot in sick whilst rocking a howling toddler and I didn't want to remind her of those dark times?