A lot of time has past since our last post.  (Thanks for all your email gently prodding me to write another update.)  The truth is that no news has been gloriously good news.  Typical summer, typical Halloween, typical Christmas—typical and happy doing everything a 10 (now 11) year old boy should be doing.

In school Lio is learning, maths remaining his strength and music remaining his pride.  Outside of school he’s playing with his friends and picking up a new instrument at every opportunity—trumpet is the latest addition to piano, guitar and singing.  Life is very good for him at the moment, if a bit manic for me:  I’m doing more at the University of Sussex.  Last term I had to cover as head of my subject area because of a colleague’s cancer recovery.  But more importantly, this spring I’m going to really push myself to make some headway on my next writing project, which is likely to be a book about being tall as told through the lens of all Lio’s leg operations.

Our big preoccupation at the moment is perfectly normal, something faced by most families:  the choice of secondary school.  We’ve looked at just about every school within a 45-minute radius and Lio’s done some entrance exams for a few independent schools.  I’ve had countless meetings with head teachers and educational needs people.  I’ve been completely open and honest about the spells Lio is going to have to spend in a wheelchair in the future and the remaining speech and language issues (mostly reading comprehension).  Some of them have come back saying that they don’t think they’d be able to cater for Lio, which is absolutely fine.  We want to make sure we find the right situation for him—like with doctors, there is no abstract ‘best school’ out there.

While Lio’s doing more and more sport and pushing himself physically every week, it feels like his next round of leg lengthening is certainly nearer than his last one.  He really wanted to do a running race with his school last week.  I was in two minds, but he did it–and did it very respectably; however for the past three days he’s been limping around in real pain.  When he went into the garage last night to fish out his old crutches my heart sank.  I can’t and desperately don’t want to hold him back.  I want him to have as physical a childhood as he wants to have, but it still hurts to see him in pain, especially when we both remember how things were during the last bout of lengthening.  I’ve made a touch-base appointment with his brilliant physio here in Lewes and we’ll talk things over with his surgeon at Great Ormond Street when we next see him in a couple of months.

As his legs grow, so does he as a person.  Last month he decided he wanted to start reading After the Crash.  I had expected that he’d be curious about it when he was approaching adulthood (and I partly wrote it with a grown-up Lio in mind—as a kind of testament to some future Lio about how strong and courageous he’d been as a child), so I was a bit apprehensive about it in the hands of an 11-year-old Lio.  But like his running race, I decided to let him experiment with a bit more autonomy. Not far into it he started pulling our old photo albums down from the shelf and went off into a whirlwind of drawing based on the pictures of him in hospital, some with a remarkable depth of feeling and sensitity—particularly one of him hugging a young doctor at his leaving party.

I’m thinking about how to nurture and encourage this energy and creativity in the midst of all his homework and music practice.  I’m thinking maybe I should clear out the garage and put a few more tools and a workbench for him in there for some ambitious building projects; it would be another nice connection to things I did with my own father.

We’re off to the continent for some doctoring (and the to Italy for a few days) for Lio’s half-term holiday in a couple of weeks.  We haven’t been there since the summer and we both miss it.   Maybe we’ll get to play in a bit of snow on the Alps.  Lio had a fantastic in the States for Christmas, with snow falling on Christmas Eve and lots of sledding and ice skating with his cousin Kevin.  He really is a creature of winter my Lio.  His sprinkle-covered birthday cake on December 26th was blue again, just like it was last year.

It’s possible that we’ll be back in the States again for Easter to coincide with the American release of After the Crash.  It all depends on what the publicist and distributor can arrange in terms of interviews.  They may decide that they want to do their blitz in May.  In any case, I fear that I’m going to have begin the social media bombardment again soon.  As you can imagine, I’m thrilled that it’s finally coming out in the US and am really looking forward to it reaching more people back home.

After the Crash has been doing fantastically in the UK.  It was my publisher’s best selling book in 2012 and has been in and out of Amazon.co.uk’s top 100 since it was published.  I’d be pleased beyond belief if it reached as many people in the US, but we’ll just have to wait and see.  I’m just glad that it’s out there.  Thanks again for all your warm wishes—they’ll always mean a lot to Lio and me.