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Always waiting for appointments.
Mar 2, 2009

We finally got the appointment for Charlotte's dental work. It's in the middle of May, six months after the referral was made. In the meantime her bad tooth is getting worse and worse and crumbling away - there'll be nothing left by the time they finally see her, at this rate. Luckily it doesn't hurt her and she's doing a brilliant job of keeping it clean.

At least we got an appointment though. We're still waiting to hear when she'll get her heart surgery and that can't come too soon for us. As long as it isn't while James is in America.

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Flu.
Feb 11, 2009

I was obviously tempting fate when I wrote that I wasn't coughing.

Lemsip is a wonderful invention.

I did manage (while under the influence of said drug) to get Charlotte and Isobel to gym, which was good because it was their last lesson. The class is being discontinued due to low numbers - for the last six weeks there have only been four children there. I don't really know why, my children enjoyed it a lot. We had tears in the car on the way home.

I'll probably see if I can get them on the waiting list at the local club again.

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7th February - Birthday.
Feb 8, 2009

Emily is now three years old, hard though it is to believe.

We've had a really lovely day, despite the fact that I'm the only person in the house who isn't coughing horribly. Isobel helped me make a birthday cake, which would have been very nice if I hadn't taken it out of the oven too early. David helped me ice it, and did a very impressive job.

We gave Emily Wii Play, so for most of the day the children have been really happy, trying out the games. They also played Wii sport, with far fewer arguments than usual now we have three remotes. Emily was also really pleased with her new recorder (we gave each of the children one in a different colour) and spent more than half an hour playing with her new dinosaur moonsand, excavating dinosaur skeletons.

Then Nanny and Grandad turned up with a new bicycle, and everything James and I gave her turned to dust in comparison. All that thought and planning, and we were trumped by a toy she can't even use yet (though she did ride up and down the hall: nearly a whole turn of the pedals to the end, get off, adult turn the bike round, nearly a whole turn of the pedals back, get off, turn the bike round...). She's going to be one child who is pleased when the snow is gone.

Then of course Emily went to sleep very early (by our standards), woke a few minutes ago with a bit of a temperature again saying "I'm not scared" - something she's been saying at frequent intervals since she first got ill over a week ago. So now she's sitting up watching Charlie and Lola until she starts feeling better. I'm hoping that tonight will be like other nights and as soon as the calpol kicks in she'll fall sound asleep and wake late tomorrow. Or much later today, as the case may be.

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Home Education.
Feb 5, 2009

Yesterday, Isobel was sitting playing with our Connect Four set, making patterns with the counters. She told me "When you start a row with red and do alternate colours, you finish with red, that's how I know it's an odd number. There are four reds and three yellows in this row and four yellows and three reds in the next row, so there are the same number of each colour in two rows and there are six rows so there are the same number of each colour in all of it. that means there must be a red one missing because I have two yellows left and only one red". Then she counted them and told me she had been right, there were 22 reds and 23 yellows, a red counter wwas definitely missing.

A little while later David was sitting playing with a plastic carrier bag, when he suddenly leapt to his feet and said "The more air is in a parachute the more slowly it goes!". He then rushed off try making a parachute to test his theory.

Emily spent some time playing Wii Sports as usual, beating me at a game of tennis; she also spent a long time singing a song from a TV programme she's watched a couple of times and gradually evolving a dance to go with it as she repeated it over and over again.

At bedtime Charlotte came and asked me a question about the Great Barrier Reef so I found her some videos online. She watched them with me, identifying most of the fish she saw and telling me interesting things about them.

I love the way Isobel notices things and works out logical proofs for her observations. I love that David can figure out how parachutes work just from messing around with a bag, and that he gets so excited by his discoveries that he has to test them straight away. I love that Emily learns songs so easily, even though she can't pronounce the words properly yet. I love the way Charlotte can acquire and retain such huge amounts of knowlege about the subjects she finds interesting.

I love love love autonomous education and the effect it has had on our lives.

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Heart problems
Feb 5, 2009

We've suspected for a while that all was not well with Charlotte, out eldest. She's extremely small for her age, and given that her father is 6'2" that's odd in itself, but she also has very little energy. She does very well at her gym class, better than many of the children there, but in between turns on whatever equipment they're using, while the other children are running around Charlotte will be lying on the floor. I've taken her to the doctor several times over the last few years only to be told "she's just small, she'll probably have a growth spurt soon, increase her calorie intake".

It came to a head last term, when her new gym instructors introduced stamina training for the children. Charlotte - the oldest in the class - never made it past level five, when the rest of the children would start dropping out around levels 15-20, youngest first. I took her back to the doctor and managed to get a referral and not long before Christmas she went to see a consultant paediatrician who told us she has a heart murmur. She had an X-ray which showed that her heart looks fine but the ECG was abnormal so she was given a referral to the cardiology clinic.

It took two months to get the cardiology appointment (and then it was because they had a cancellation) but a few days ago we finally took her to have her heart properly checked. Naturally the monitor on the ancient scan machine wasn't working so after fifteen minutes trying to get it to work the consultant had to just listen to he heart instead. He told us he was fairly certain what the problem was but we'd need another appointment, this time at Great Ormond Street hospital, to look at her and confirm the diagnosis before they could put her on the waiting list for surgery.

We thanked him for his time and walked back into town towards the car. We'd nearly got there when I had a call from the hospital asking us to go back as they'd got the machine working. We hurried up the hill back to the hospital and luckily didn't have to wait long before we were seen again.

This time the consultant was able to get a good look at her heart and confirmed the diagnosis (so we don't need to go to GOSH). What he said was "she has an extra vessel connecting the vessels to and from her lungs", I think he meant PDA but since by that time I was very conscious that we were taking up someone else's time slot - and the clinic was already running late and should have finished by that point - I didn't gather myself to question him as I should.

Anyway, it will take a simple outpatient operation to plug the extra vessel and the result will be permanent and a complete fix. It's the best diagnosis I think we could have hoped for; I still don't like the idea of my Charlotte having heart surgery of any kind, but it will be nice for her to have the kind of energy levels the others have and maybe grow to a more normal height.

Now it's just a matter of waiting for yet another appointment.

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