It's hard to believe that my youngest grandson is now 15 months old. So much has happened and not happened since he endured a two-and-a half-hour operation on the day of his birth.
Ignoring the Greek tradition of family names, my son and his Cretan wife called their son Orestes. The name means 'he who can move mountains', and it is almost as if some instinct informed the young parents of 'naming power', and of the possibility that such power might be needed. The first mountain resembled Everest: the operation, which was necessary to correct a malformed oesophagus.
Orestes' mountain-moving involved four weeks in intensive care, and he is still not out of the Himalayas, so to speak, while his parents have had to contend with their own peaks and valleys: the constant to-and-froing between home and hospital, the coping with the demands of work, the struggle to ensure that the ill baby could have his mother's milk, the sleepless nights at the hospital, for in Greek hospitals there is always one parent with the child. Round the clock: this is the way it has always been.
Then there was what I call Doctor Roulette. Orestes was very quiet when he was first home from hospital, and one paediatrician postulated that he was suffering from a syndrome none of us had ever heard of, and that he would in all likelihood be 'slow'. My firm opinion was that he was simply behind because of his very wobbly start, and another paediatrician confirmed this, much to our collective relief.
These days, after determined and continuing input of talk, songs, games and toys from many quarters, there is nothing 'slow' about O. It's rather a case of 'O on the Go', as he steams around and prattles endlessly. He was quick to learn that old foreign chook Granny makes different noises from everybody else when she talks to him, and he can now make it clear when he wants her to sing 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star'.
He is constantly alert, and starts saying his word for Dad whenever he hears the clunk of the lift after a certain time in the afternoon.
But the ups and downs have continued: the numerous hospital stays, each one involving anaesthesia, so that the site of the operation could be dilated and strengthened; the reflux that is part of the problem, and which led to a failure to thrive for a worrying