Witchy Charlotte and Ghostly William

Very excited children getting ready for trick-or-treating!

Happy Hallowe’en!

Elijah as Super Mario and William as an old-school ghost. By the end of the night, Eli’s moustache was long gone, and William had a full costume change after he kept tripping on his sheet!

Now we are six!

Happy birthday to Elijah and William: six years old today!
Yesterday we had a bowling party for a dozen of their closest friends – some were brand-new Kindergarten classmates, but several were old daycare buddies. Everyone had a great time celebrating the boys’ birthday.
In the picture, Elijah’s in purple and William’s in blue (as usual), and they’re each blowing out six candles on their shared cake.

Hallowe’en is coming…

This is Elijah’s extra-spooky vision of Hallowe’en: bats, ghosts, spiders, pumpkins, plus a werewolf, a zombie and a full moon! Scary… but pretty impressive, considering we just got the kids’ school progress report cards and Eli’s only issue is that “he doesn’t hold his pencil properly” yet – that’s obviously not holding him back.
As for the other kids, Charlotte’s doing amazingly in everything except for “behaviour in Phys. Ed.” (no surprise there), although one of her teachers described her as “calm”, so we’re wondering if she’s been mixed up with another child. As for William, I’ve been asked to come in for a meeting with his teacher next week to discuss “behaviour.” We’re not terribly surprised about this either – Will’s not exactly a “sit still and play quietly” kind of kid, so we’ve been anticipating some friction between school expectations and his natural, quirky exuberance. He seemed to have a fair number of friends when I brought him to a classmate’s birthday party on the weekend, so hopefully he’s not terrorizing any of his peers. We’ll find out next week!

William’s clean bill of health!

William had another hospital checkup today, and I’m delighted to report that the cardiologist has pronounced his heart “normal”- hooray! He’d had some abnormalities in his ECG’s during his illness back in March, but now that they’ve done a follow-up, the doctor says he’s fine. I also dropped by the neurology department to ask about the EEG he had in August, and they reassured me that “no news is generally good news.” The secretary also promised someone would get back to me and confirm that the test looked ok. William was a trooper, as always, and was perfectly happy to ride up and down in elevators as we visited different departments, then sit himself down to play Lego Star Wars on his DS whenever we had to wait for another doctor. 

 I still feel very emotional every time we go back to the Children’s Hospital, because it brings up all the memories and anxiety from William’s hospitalization… still, it’s a great hospital with wonderful people working there, and I’m so grateful for the care he’s received there.  

Epic Uno Tournament

Eric’s parents came to Montreal for the weekend of his marathon, and they taught the boys how to play Uno. Charlie already loves the game and was delighted to show off her skills, and all of us ended up playing for hours over the weekend. I’d love to say that Elijah was as gracious in victory as in defeat, but let’s just say there was a lot of “We are the Champions” being sung around the table.

Look, Eric ran a marathon!

Eric ran the Montreal marathon on Sep. 23 and finished in a very respectable 4 hours, 7 minutes. What a superstar!