Have a look at his video here….

Last weekend we spent the day on the Real Ale Train (RAT). The four of us, Niki, Callum, Chloe and I met with Andy (a colleague from work) and his son Austin.

We caught two trains to Alton where Andy had already called ahead with our cooked breakfast order – yum!! We boarded the RAT steam train at Alton with Andy’s dad and father-in-law. Hugh and his son Mark also caught up with us a few stations up the line.

Other than sampling the ale, the kids all loved being on a steam train and also jumping off at every available point so that they could see the steam engine.

Callum, being a typical boy, was a dirt magnet, as you can see from the photo!

We hope to take Callum next week when Thomas the Tank Engine come to the Watercress Line for a holiday – I am sure more photos will follow that day too!

…things have come on a long way since then.

Callum is going to Pre-School twice a week, which he absolutely loves! Plays Rugby with Rugby Tots on a Saturday and is in to everything when he isn’t doing either of these – mostly building Train Tracks (he is a little train obsessed) or ‘helping’ Mummy with cooking, gardening or hoovering…..

We recently bought a Flip HD Camera which is excellent!  We thought we would test it by getting Callum to sing Twinklew Twinkle Little Star, a nursery rhyme that we had been teaching him and this is how it went…..

Fast Tube by Casper

Apparently this is a version that they teach at Pre-School, but Niki and I had never heard it before.  He does know more lines now so I hope to get the extended version on here soon!

In my year void of posts on the Toogood Blog, the birth of our Daughter has been missed.

Chloe Jane Toogood was born at 16:07 on the 4th March 2010 weighing 7lb 5oz.

The labour was vary much shorter this time and Niki only used entonox as pain relief!!  Furthermore we were out of the hospital the very same day – how very different a story than Callums birth.

Chloe is nearly 5 months old now so expect to see some posts about her soon

Life has calmed down a little, although things have recently got busy again…. but thats another story.

I have realised that I haven’t posted on the Toogood blog for nearly a year!! (all but a few days).

The last post was about my battle against EDS so I guess I had better start by finishing that one off…..

Between my last post (July 2009) and Christmas I saw a consultant a number of times, had blood tests, CSF tests (don’t have a lumbar puncture – I had concussion and vertigo symptoms for 8 days following mine and couldn’t stand for nearly the whole time!) had multiple sleep studies, and a CT Scan and the final result was……

….Nothing!  I have been advised that the quality of my sleep was below average and that I had lots of symptoms, none of which were strong enough to form a diagnosis.  I have been told that working shifts is not ideal and that I need to keep an eye on my work patterns to ensure that the symptoms do not return.

So after all this time and all those tests there was a bit of an anticlimax I’m afraid.

It wont be too long before the next update comes out as I have loads to write about!!

For those of you that don’t know, I have been suffering from Excessive Daytime Sleepiness. This doesn’t just mean that I get a little sleepy in the afternoon like we all do, but means that I fall asleep often without notice for a few seconds to minutes. I have been known to fall asleep in a number of situations at work and at home including during a conversation amongst many worse times….

It appears that this has been going on longer than I thought and just put it down at first to having a busy lifestyle, then due to having an under active thyroid. But when my thyroid medication levels were correct or even high and the sleepiness hadn’t reduced I decided that it was time to take some action and seek some.

I have been assessed mostly in Oxford for diabetes, Thyroid medication levels, Obstructive Sleep Apnea and now Narcolepsy, all of which have proved to be negative which is good in some ways but bad in others as I don’t know what is wrong with me.

The plan from today;

So tomorrow I start taking the tablets and see how that goes and now wait for the appointments to come through. Any new developments and I will keep you updated.

I few weeks ago our lovely son Callum who is toilet training decided to take himself to the downstairs bathroom and wash his hands. He managed to get the taps on but couldn’t turn them off resulting in an overflowing sink, and what can only be described as a small swimming pool in the bathroom and a paddling pool in the hallway.

After a few frantic phone calls Niki managed to get her sister to bring a vax round to suck up the water (I was at work). Unfortunately the carpet then started t smell awful, and no matter what we cleaned it with it didn’t get any better. Enough was enough, so I ripped it up a few days later and chucked it out the front door. Now we have a lovely laminate floor!

Just need to get the skirting board on and paint the walls now……

I went to see my Dr about trying to increase my Thyroxine in order to combat my Excessive Daytime Sleepiness and all that he could say was that I needed to loose weight.

I get frustrated with Drs at the best of times and came away even more upset than normal. Having said that, I did make me go and talk to one of my neighbours. We live in an estate built in the 60s (I think) where all of the houses are on top of each other and you can see what everybody is doing, and yet you never seem to talk to your neighbours unless its about the amount of noise that each other is making. One of our neighbours is always in her garage at the end of our garden, and she is always putting stuff in her car and gets big deliveries every Monday morning. All a little bit odd, but then one day I saw that she put a weight watchers sign in her boot….

…Its quite a big deal, a bloke asking a woman who he doesn’t know if she runs weight watchers and what it involves. I had tried it once before online, as I’m not really into this group hugging and meeting malarky. But she convinced me that its not like Little Britain’s Fat Fighters, and they
don’t talk about dust…..

Fast Tube by Casper

She convinced me that I should go along and see what happens – so I did!

At my heaviest I was 17.5 stone, but when I started going to Weight Watchers I was 16 stone 5.5 pounds, and 7 weeks later I have managed to loose 1 stone 6.5 pounds!!!!

The thing that I like about weight watchers is that I don’t actually feel like I’m on a diet – OK, I need to say no sometimes when others are eating food that I don’t really need, but I still eat my full fat cheddar cheese, still drink beer and occasionally have a Kebab…. is this really a diet – who cares – it works!!!!

Well its official, Niki is pregnant again and we are expecting another baby in March 2010. Its obviously early days but people notice quicker when you work for the Ambulance Service as you are not aloud to work on the road, so people ask questions quicker!

As and when we have more news we will look to update the blog and facebook, so check back soon for regular updates.

If your not organised enough to come back, you could always subscribe to the RSS Feed, and if your not tech savy enough, you could always enter your email address in to the little form on the blog to be emailed updates!

Callum has been with us for 6 months now and so much has changed since we updated the blog last. Lots of people told me when I got married that I would want to do the ceremony again, but this time I would want to be in the audience so that I could see what happened and remember it! They couldn’t have been more right.

People have said to me that I should make the most of Callums first few months as babies grow up so quickly.

This is oh so true!

I don’t really know what babies should be able to do by what age, but I do know that babies haven’t read the manual either and therfore they don’t know too!

We have recently come back from our two pre-baptism sessions at our local church. Whilst there we saw a young baby. It was difficult to believe that our little Callum was that small once!

Niki has recently styarted doing shifts back on the Ambulances, so we both got a batism of fire! Niki had 3, 12 hour, shifts on an Ambulance that week, this meant that I had 3, 12 hour, shifts with Callum.

Those of you that know me well will know that I have the memory of a very forgetfull goldfish! I therefore asked Niki to write me a brief list of her daily routine. My three shifts went well – we had a ball!!!

Callum was being the fun smiley baby that we all know well for the first two shifts, but he started to teeth again during my third shift. He has two teeth through already, and I’m sure I can feel the next one or two that are well on their way!

Callum has been learning to situp unaided – now he has realised that he can do this he is trying to sit up all the time and dosen’t want to lie down. If he isn’t sitting he probably wants to stand. He is strong enough to hold himself upright but need to hold onto something to maintain his balance.

A game that we play is “Hide and Seek”, we started of by holding thismuslin up between him and I so that he can’t see me, you then take the muslin out of the way and say Boo! Well now Callum has found that he can put the muslin over his face and then take it away again expecting you to say Boo! each time. We have played this game alot recently as I am sure you can imagine.

The last thing that he has learnt over the last few days is to make a noise, this noise I think is mainly out of excitement. He does it when he is eating and also when he is playing. I can’t think how to explain what the noise is. However if you are to take in a large breath, but make a noise at the back of your throat as if you are having troble breathing…..

….well this is what he does. With both Niki and I working on the Ambulances, it is a very familiar noise to us, and its quite scary to hear it coming form your 6 month old child. Luckily, when you look at him, he is always a good colour and is normally smiling!