'Oh My God, you've turned into a Stepford wife' said him indoors.

He had found me sat at the kitchen table in a flowery dress and apron, playing a game of 'pairs' with daughter and a pack of cards while a saucepan full of home-made jam bubbled on the stove.

I must admit the overall impression must have been a bit like Little House on the Prairie and was somewhat removed from my usual evening habits of slobbing about in baggy clothes waiting for a takeaway to be delivered while necking a glass of red wine.

I was wearing the flowery dress because I'd put it on for work that morning and hadn't bothered getting changed.

The apron was because I like the dress and didn't want blackberry jam stains all over it. The jam was because Him Indoors had rather over enthusiastically picked an awful lot of blackberries whilst walking the dog up the hill.

Another dog walker had given me the recipe for the jam, which I had never made before, so this was a trial run.

And I was playing cards with daughter because she is still rather thin and weak following a recent bout of pneumonia which landed her in hospital for a few days. She is convalescing now but isn't well enough to leave the house without getting dizzy spells and has reached the extremely bored stage, which is why we were playing cards with an old pack we had found which had pictures of various kings and queens of Britain through the ages on it.

Mind you, I could tell she was getting better by her reaction to some of the cards.

"He's quite fit" she said scrutinising a picture of a medieval boy king dressed in shining armour, "bagsie him for me."

"You can only have him if you find the matching pair" I told her, turning over a picture of Elizabeth the first. "Oh my god, who is that?" said daughter, "she so needs to get to the beach and surely she should know that orange is so not a good colour."

The game continued in this shallow vein until daughter's 'getting better early to bed' time and she was tucked in.

I decanted the jam into jars, wondering whether to go the whole hog and make home-made labels for it but deciding that was a bit too Stepfordy even for me.

My mum phoned to see how daughter was doing and I was glad to report that she was definitely improving.

It has been a worrying few weeks, starting with daughter passing out as we left the house to go to the doctors one day and then being admitted to hospital a few days later. I must say everybody we came into contact with at the children's hospital was absolutely brilliant and I cannot praise them enough. So a big thank you to all the staff there.

I've got two weeks annual leave starting with the bank holiday weekend. To finish off daughter's convalescence we are going away to Greece the second week, thankfully to an island that hasn't had any earthquakes or other trouble.

Daughter has managed to lose a stone in weight during her illness, and is quite pleased with her new skinny body, although I think a week's lazing about on the beach eating lots of Greek food will soon get her back to normal.

Me, I'm just looking forward to a couple of weeks off work and worry and being able to do absolutely nothing except have some fun.