With 3 boys under 5, there’s never a dull moment. Certainly never a quiet one… Buggy Blogger mum to J (4), B (2) and S (1) plays Florence Nightingale to her ill, injured and just-a-tad-unhinged offspring.

All hail to Calpol, best friend and saviour at 3 in the morning when the baby's yelling for Britain and the warm duvet seems but a distant memory.

It's been a week of maladies and wakeful nights. I've bought out half of Boots in effort to counteract the sniffles and sleep deficit. Poor S has been up with crimson cheeks, burning forehead and hair damp against his scalp. Meanwhile his brothers have been hacking through the small hours with chesty coughs like 50-a-day B&H smokers.

Thank heavens for the Calpol – into which we've made a serious dent – and its pink sticky alter ego junior Benylin which I've been spooning down in desperate hope of helping them … and therefore me … off to sleep.

Still, I can't pretend to be surprised they’re poorly. It's gone all brass monkeys outside so everyone and their brother's coughing and spluttering. And truth be told, with 3 little ones I'm always likely to have one who's under the weather at any given time whatever the temperature.

Take J for instance. He is quite simply the King of Snot. Winter, Spring or Summer, he's as prone to congestion as the M25. We get through truckloads of Kleenex yet his upper lip still tends to look like a war zone. That said, as he's got older, the state of his nose has thankfully improved somewhat. Chiefly because he's discovered the benefit of having sleeves close to hand. Or close to nose I should say.

In addition to (and perhaps because of) his muchos mucus, J also develops terribly chesty coughs. Part of my Boots spree thus included a packet of children's cough pastilles which I have to say slightly back-fired. Rather than providing the hoped-for miracle cure they succeeded instead in provoking a crisis of comedy coughing: 'Cough, cough, I'd feel so much better … cough … if I had one of those … cough, cough … special sweeties'.

When he's not wheezing … or wheedling for more cough sweets … he also professes to suffer from assorted aches and pains. He bemoans his hurting tummy/legs/eyes or any part of the body that springs to mind. Is it growing pains or just the consequence of his madcap scooting style? Our trip to school usually sees at least 3 dramatic tumbles as we zoom, crash, zoom, crash, zoom, crash our way to the gates. Put like this, it's easy to see how a boy can develop all-over aches … and muddy trousers too … with his Evel Knievel style scooting technique.

S looks set to follow right in his eldest brother's footsteps. He's just as prone to bouts of 'steam-train chest' and the odd stuntman injury too. Even now he's sporting an unexplained forehead bruise. I'm unsure if it's a stair-surfing injury or big-brother related but it's certain to be the result of some ill-advised exploit. Despite the daredevil streak, however, he's still a big girl’s blouse. It's easy being fearless when mummy's close at hand. But if it looks like she's heading for the door, all bravado goes out the window (though fortunately the have-a-go hero himself hasn't yet tried going the same way).

B meanwhile is less a victim of phlegm and falling over but shows early signs of an addictive streak. He's constantly sucking his thumb. He's obsessional about his Wellington boots. He eats blueberries (or ***addiction alert*** 'glueberries') with compulsion. He also has a rather irksome infatuation with the word 'where' right now – every conversation or book-reading is hampered by him asking 'where this, where that' every 5 seconds. Is it a short term memory problem or the incredible amount of ear-wax the boy seems to generate which simply means he hasn't heard you?

Which reminds me. Better put Wax-Away ear drops onto the shopping list for my next Boots extravaganza. Which at the rate we’re getting through the Calpol won't be long.

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