Busy busy

In the mountains this weekend

We've had quite a busy period what with vaccinations, doctor's appointments and the like. This morning, we had an appointment with the head of the pediatric cardiology department at the hospital where Dylan was born. It took me four months to get in and I got in that "quickly" only because Cristiano's aunt has a friend who works in the reservations department. In any case, Dylan needed to be checked out for a potential heart problem that was detected when he was born. The day after he was born, he was rushed into an elevator and down to the cardiology department because the nurses thought his heart was "beating on the wrong side of his chest." Fortunately, I was too dazed to know what was going. Cristiano went with him and I was never given the full story of how scary it was until much later. In any case, they concluded his heart was "in the right place" (hee hee) but found that he had some kind of small opening in his heart that is fairly common in newborns. When we left the hospital, we were told to bring him back in a year, which is why we went today.

He has something called patent foramen ovale (PFO), which basically means one of the shunts in his heart has not fully closed. The doctor said it is incredibly common and in Dylan's case is not a congenital defect. It should close by the time he is three, and he should require no further treatment.

In other news, he's talking his head off. He probably says thirty words, half in English and half in Italian. His favorite word at the moment is "hot," and he likes to tell you when things are hot, from the radiator to the oven to a steaming cup of tea. The fact that he's speaking so much English means that now Cristiano's 80-year-old nonna has had to learn a few English words to be able to understand him. It's amazing how he can put concepts together. There's an ad on TV where a half-naked woman walks out of a flaming background. When he sees it, he screams "hot!"