Pox

Happy Christmas! Ours has been neatly sandwiched between bouts of chicken pox: first Sylvan in the last week of school, and now Arthur, who started looking ropey on the way home from Wales. Pox is a bad thing to get if you're post-transplant, and this had somehow translated in my head to being a bad thing for livers per se. So I had been avoiding Arthur catching it it in a passive sort of a way, because although I knew that really he'd be better off having it and developing immunity, I had also been assuming that if he did get it he would crumple in a little yellow heap and be slapped on the transplant list anyway. We're three days in and at 80+ pox now, and there's no sign of that, so one more irrational fear laid to rest. Touch wood. Poor Sylvan missed all the end of term fun - his Christmas party and getting to be not just a shepherd but one of the only two moving shepherds in the nativity. We played a lot of junior monopoly that week, so it was a relief to finally be able to give him the adult Oxford version and play that instead, even if it does last for bloody hours and have several inaccuracies that annoy me*.

Between the pox Christmas was good. We went to Wales to visit Mike's family, and did the usual things the boys love of going to the beach, feeding horses and the like. The weather was pretty rubbish though, and it's dark noticeably longer than it is down here.

* Walton Street is mis-spelt Wolton Street. Oxford & Cherwell Valley College is still labelled as the CFE. The albeit stupidly named Oxford Espress bus service is put as the Oxford Express. The Ashmolean and the Randolph have been put as separate properties but are in fact on the same road. It's got an Abbey National sponsored square even though they've gone bust.