Gearing up for School Camp as an Allergy Sufferer

All of the dressings and bandages hanging up to dry

My big guy is a great kid and on the whole, he doesn't complain too much (other than jobs, homework, the usual nearly 12 year old kinda stuff).  He and I both know that there are a lot of other kids out there who have a whole bunch of things that are actually really hard to deal with.   We know that because we have had to spent a lot of our years popping into have his regular checkups, fine tunings if you like, over the last 10 years at the Royal Children's Hospital.  He sufferers from asthma, eczema (it has taken me 10 years to learn how to spell that word) and rhinitis, and his youngest brother suffers, to a milder degree, the same as well as food anaphylaxis.

For my 3 guys, though, life goes on, they still have to muck in, run around, eat stuff, fight, get into trouble and just generally behave like normal kids, and we are just a normal family probably, except for odd the ventolin inhalers and epipens hanging around and multiple tubes of cream, oil and ointment in the bathroom.

Anyway, I do tend to get a little fatigued with it all occasionally (I wonder if there is such a condition as an "Allergy-Mum-Fatigue"...if so, I may have caught it).  So when it came to bedtime last night, and he told me 'His Worries' (which seems to be a nightly routine at the moment, after bedtime....), which were about going to camp next week with his skin being out of control, I had a sudden onset of Chronic-Allergy-Mum-Fatigue and was waning between exhaustion and screaming at the same time.  After recovering, I then proceeded to oint (is there such a word), cream and dress his itchy patches and explained that I-was-in-charge-from-here-until-camp-so-listen-to-me-or ... but I couldn't think of what to say after or as I had calmed down by then and realised that by now I had already missed so much of "The September Issue" that it didn't matter anyway.

So from here until camp next week, it is my rules (which means I will be spending 3 times a day treating his skin so that he will have gorgeous skin that women would kill for...maybe I should do mine as well...) and then he will be able to play in the sea to his hearts content on camp, and I will mop up the mess after camp again and before the holiday camp that he is signed up for.  *sigh*

The things no-one told me before I became a mother.  Luckily I adore my boys!