Banging a pan lid for Easter

An Easter time, a spring time that seems so long ago.
A sunny day in the garden. Daffodils, a picnic rug, frogs in the little pond, birdsong, you.
For once you seemed really aware of the camera and in the pictures you are looking, really looking, into the lens. There's a curiosity in your eyes, but also such a settled contentedness.

Why so happy? Well, you've got your noisiest toys, a pan lid to bang and your juice.
You're sitting on the lawn of our place in Halifax and are taking great care to make sure your feet don't touch the grass - you never liked the feel of it between your toes. Sometimes, when you'd rumpled the rug and nearly bottom-shuffled your way off it, you'd have to bend your knees and crinkle up your toes so only your heels were touching...until one of us grabbed you under your arms and hoisted you back on again.

I can't see the helium balloon on the photo but it would be there somewhere, unless you'd already burst it during over-exuberant bashing! You always got a helium balloon for Easter because you didn't like chocolate - something about the texture perhaps. Funny boy, who preferred grapes and satsumas to 'proper' sweet treats any day.

Remember we went to church once one Easter Day morning?
No idea why we thought it might be a good idea....but we were full of the joys of spring and, I suppose, felt it would be a good family thing to do.
It didn't go well. You were extra happyshouty that day and, even though it was a family service, they came over and asked wouldn't it be better if we took you away into a side room.

I refused. Mortified that they had asked. They were probably being kind but all I could think at that moment was that they didn't want you in their congregation, that your difference was an obstacle to their worship. And all my embarrassment, shame and rage at your rejection vented itself in hot, quiet, tears.
Thank goodness for you who, oblivious, and no doubt relishing the wide open echoey spaces of the church, shouted all the louder. That showed them.

The picnic rug pictures were a few Easters later.

Thinking...you had started turning blue then.
Barely noticeable at first.
Like a scudding cloud briskly sweeping across the sun, a shadow would touch your lips, your fingertips, the apple of your cheeks... and be gone as quickly as it had appeared.

I'm recalling that first time in hospital: when they had to take you off the monitor because your oxygen levels dropped so regularly, and every time they did an alarm would sound and ever time it sounded a whole team of medics would race to your bedside...to find you alert and beaming.

No doctor was ever able to get to the root of what was happening to you. The heart doctor referred you to the chest consultant who sent you to neurologist and, at the end of it all, they shook their heads and said: 'see, how little we know...how little we know'.

So with puzzlement in their eyes and a summons for regular check-ups they sent you home - and off you went, striding out, your thin little legs in their plastic splints, along the polished corridors of Leeds General Infirmary's Clarendon wing.

And so those 'blue do's' as we came to call them, simply became part of you, your make-up.
They didn't appear to be harming you, but I worried that perhaps one day they would. And sometimes it got in the way of enjoying our time together.

Easter always seems a difficult time somehow. Everything blooming, colourful, so full of life, of renewal, of promise.

And these pictures well, let's just say sometimes, just sometimes, it's hard to stand before them.

They're showing Mary Poppins on the Beeb today, the Easter Sunday afternoon film. Your absolute favourite. So we know we'd be doing, don't we, if you were still here...