Dancing

A happy Monday with Luca, spent playing games, doing jigsaw puzzles, reading stories and chasing around the house on his two old-favourite wheeled toys: 'Nana, you drive the bus, I'll drive the car".  He loves this routine. He'll soon outgrow these little wooden vehicles, but for now, they're his favourite port of call on a Monday morning.  A three year old imagination can transform any domestic corner into a bus station, a shopping centre, a playground - complete with complex requirements for how and where to 'park'.

Then I took Luca with me to pick Frieda up from preschool, driving by a slightly roundabout route, to ensure that he had a short therapeutic nap on the way over there.  By the time we needed to go and meet Frieda, he'd had a little rest and was ready for more fun.

We went back to Ruth and Josh's house, where both kids enjoyed  dancing around the living room; my only photos are hasty iPhone ones, as we all tried to avoid mid-floor collisions. Ruth cooked tea for both of them, and for Eben, and then I took Frieda home.

Talking with Ruth about Luca's galactosaemia is often a minefield, as it's easy to trigger her panicky feelings and memories from his early days. And so I rarely initiate any discussions on that theme; when  I do, it's usually a mistake (as in a recent example, when I asked if she and Josh had any info about a particular food item's safety, and that just left her with renewed anxieties - and neither of us was any the wiser).  But today she spontaneously offered to show me the latest letter from his six-monthly monitoring visits at Sheffield Children's Hospital.  She knows that with my public health research career history, I love to see any available clinical info. The reports, so far, are all good. An added bonus was to see, from the letter, that the paediatrician who saw Luca had previously been at Birmingham Children's Hospital, where Luca spent a week in the paediatric liver unit as a tiny baby.  He remembered us all from that time (2019). That felt good.