February 1, 2008

Hello again! Well here we are, into February, and it's actually quite scary how fast time is flying by.

Life has been (pleasantly!) quiet for the last few weeks - we've just been doing stuff around the house and Charlie has been full of beans, as always.

He's quite excited at the prospect of starting 'big school' in September, although he wasn't too happy about the idea of boring black shoes instead of the funky red ones with flashing lights that he's wearing at the moment!

He's also EXTREMELY excited about the holiday we've got planned.... we've booked to go to Eurodisney again in April, so he's already counting the days! We're quite looking forward to it as well - so long as the weather's ok. I have to say, Disney in the USA has a big advantage, as France in April is not where you'd really choose to go for a sunshine holiday! Oh well.

Charlie and I have just come back from the garden centre - the plants in the tub outside our front door were well and truly dessicated, so we've replaced them with some spring flowers, and Charlie also picked a little spring arrangement with a little frog on it to take up to the churchyard for his brother. (If you've missed the story about Charlie's big brother Will, feel free to click on the link to Will's Web Page in the sidebar).

We had a letter this morning from the hospital in Birmingham, confirming everything that was told to us after Charlie's cardiac catheter. They are really pleased with Charlie's cardiac function, and will just keep an eye on his funny heart rate, unless it starts affecting him.

We also had a letter from the hospital here in Cardiff, telling us to take Charlie in for another 24-hour holter monitor this month. He had one of these when he was in hospital, but they would like another one to see what his heart rate does when he's going about his normal life. He'll have to go to playschool with the monitor on, but I've signed up to go in for the afternoon he'll be wearing it as a 'visiting parent' so the teachers won't have to worry about the equipment, and I can keep a note of what he's up to - the hospital need a little diary to say what he's doing and when, so they see if his heart rate is going up or down as it should be. In all likelihood the intermittent heart block will still be there, but hopefully it won't have worsened. We're also really hoping that maybe it was just some after-effect of the cardiac catheter, and that it might have cleared up altogether. Not very likely really, but there's no harm in hoping.

January was a really busy month for Charlie's blog - we had more visitors last month than in any other single month before, and we're now well over 3,000 visitors, and rising! We're still getting new visitors from far-flung places - the Philippines was the latest new one! I know I've said it before, but please feel free to leave us a message if you'd like to - we love to hear from the people who've been visiting. I've put a new little widget on the side of the blog to show whereabouts our visitors are coming from, but I haven't worked out how often the figures are being updated - I think it's maybe once a day or once a week, rather than every time someone visits. We shall see!!

I'm attaching a pic of Charlie at the garden centre today... what is it about kids and Pick and Mix sweets?!