So, the hand-over of Marek to his new foster family was this Tuesday.

It’s been… different without him. Quieter, especially. We’re adjusting to life as it was before him.

As for myself, I seem to be taking it fairly well. Stella seems to be, too, though I don’t know how much of that is “public face”.

She spent a lot of time with Amy in the past couple of days, partly to make up for how little time she had for Amy previously; Amy was at home for Wednesday until Friday. On Wednesday, they went to the deer park together.

In unrelated Amy news, she got accepted to preschool, where she’ll start in August.

I was a bit surprised that the note said that “for your child, attendance at remedial language courses will be mandatory, three days a week”. (I don’t remember the exact wording, but something to that effect.)

I wonder what they based that requirement on: the fact that I speak English? (Does that make her “a child with a background of migration”?) Or that she speaks fairly softly? Stella asked around a bit whether others thought Amy spoke unclearly but, as I gather, nobody thought she had a problem in that regard. (Though my father once said he has difficulty understanding her.)

Eh, we’ll find out soon enough what it is, and whether they still think she needs it after she’s been there a couple of times.

So apparently, the "correct" way to address Marek is as "Marku"—at least in Polish, which still has a vocative.

So yay! I like the vocative case; it and the dual number are probably my favourite grammatical features.

It was also fun to find out that Czech has it, too—by watching an issue of Little Red Tractor on YouTube and comparing the title with what the tractor is called when he's addressed directly.

( Executive summary: better )

After Amy and I left the hospital, we went for a walk in Meyers Park, basically "right next door", at Stella's suggestion. She also said there was a little pony... thingy ("farm" sounds wrong) where you could ride ponies for a small fee.

We saw two girls in riding boots ahead of us and figured they might know where it was, and it was just up the path a bit. And theoretically they were closed on Christmas Day, but they were doing a few rides anyway, subject to the number of volunteers present. So Amy got to ride once around the place on a pony, and was happy as could be about that. Afterwards, we looked at the horses and ponies stabled there.

Then we ate dinner at KFC, and finally came back home.

Unrelatedly, when I connected my satnav to the PC with the USB cable and visited the "My Garmin" Dashboard, it said there was a new firmware revision available. I told it to update, but at about 40%, the Internet connection apparently cut out—at any rate, the progress bar stalled at that position, and shortly afterwards, I got an AIM system message telling me I was signed in at two locations, which typically happens when the Internet connection drops and gets reestablished, especially when it's due to the router rebooting itself.

Now I hope the device isn't completely broken; when I clicked "Cancel", it warned that this may leave my device inoperable. It did act a bit strange after I disconnected and reconnected the USB cable (the display lit up and the battery level meter went away, which makes sense since it was charging and connected to an external power source, but normally it switches to external storage mode when you connect a USB cable and you can't interact with it any more), but eventually switched to storage mode. So... acting slightly weird, but I hope it's still basically OK. *knocks on wood.*

Marek's in hospital right now, probably with pneumonia.

A week or so ago, he got "vaccinated" (is that that the word? They didn't give him dead or disabled germs but instead antibodies) against pneumonia, since preemies are apparently at risk for that (and the shot cost on the order of €1000, apparently; thank goodness insurance paid for it).

On Saturday, he was drinking very little, only about half of what he "should" be, so Stella took him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with bronchitis and discharged hom again, with orders to report back the following day.

So Stella took him back on Sunday (missing Ireen's and Emily's birthday party... probably just as well, since with the snow on the roads, coming back took me an hour and a half and I was glad I just had a sleeping Amy in my car and not a possibly-cranky baby as well), but he seemed to be doing better so he came home again that day.

Then today at physical therapy, he had problems breathing and Stella took him to the paediatrician (where they snuck him in between appointments); then he got taken to hospital in an ambulance.

Stella was only home for a couple of hours this afternoon, and she'll be spending the night there.

If it does end up pneumonia, he'll probably stay in hospital for a week or so, and Stella will probably spend most of that time there with him; the nurses asked her to do so because they're too short on staff to take care of him properly (attend to him when he cries, that sort of thing; I don't think they'd let him die), returning home only for a couple of hours a day. She did say she'd spend the night of the 24th/25th at home, though.

So, we'll see. The antibodies (or globulins or whatever it actually was) will hopefully make his case of pneumonia an easier one, if that is what he has.

Poor chap.

And especially because he's been in hospital so often that they have a hard time getting a blood vessel for an infusion or a blood draw or whatever; much of the likely surface area (hands, head) is already covered in scars.