Hello!

hoping everyone had a wonderful summer!

I was able this summer to have a half day camp for 2 weeks and it was so much fun. I got my creative juices flowing again and am so ready to get back to the thick of it.

Classes are back from September 14th. I will be updating this website with new information as I can find a moment here and there to get away from my toddler. As I write this I am hiding in the bedroom as my son doesn’t know I am home. haha.

Basically the schedule is the same and as I write this there’s space available in all time slots. But that will change.

One big change currently there will be no classes on Sunday. Maybe in the future I can revisit this, but for now there simply wasn’t enough interest last year with a different teacher and I am not able to be available.

In other less then happy news I am being forced to raise prices. I have done so for the previous 2 years, but I must do so again. Though I have recently started increasing in the last two years, before that I had not at all since opening MartinArts.

The prices of art supplies alone have increased way above the rate of inflation and food. The most affordable art supply stores in the GTA went out of business two years ago and since then the remaining stores have not had the competition to keep prices down, many prices have doubled.

Online art supply stores other then for markers and pencil crayons are just as expensive or more. Then of course there’s the pesky inflation we are all feeling. I am not happy about have to do this for a third year.

I believe despite the price increase my prices will still be very competitive compared to other art classes. if anyone is having difficultly affording my classes at the new price please come to speak to me!

So as many have already read last year at this time was a difficult for me, as my then four month old baby was listed for a liver transplant. Thankfully he received his gift of life October 18 2023. I was back to teaching in November. I was masking to prevent getting my son sick who was extremely immune compromised post transplant. I had asked for the understanding of parents and students to work with me to keep students home if they were sick and to mask if they had recently been around someone sick.

It was a huge success!!! Thanks to everyone! With all the help of my parents and students, my child did not catch a single cold while he was in isolation at home with my husband. Other then COVID at Christmas which was due to an ER visit.

He is nearly a year post transplant without any rejection, that means he will be much less immune compromised from the middle of October. Colds will however continue to hit him differently then the average toddler. So during cold and flu season I will go back to wearing masks in public. But the consequences are far less dire, and just annoying. Colds will last longer then in the average child. So we are looking to limit exposure within reason. So if a student comes to class with symptoms I will provide them with a mask to wear and keep more of a distance. As a side note, COVID interestingly is not a threat to my son, in children it generally isn’t, but immune suppression medication in the case of COVID seems to make it even more mild, in most cases. In fact it went through my family recently and we barley noticed he was sick. It got me bad and that is why I am late in updating the website this year just getting back to feeling like myself now.

I am once again very much looking forward to all the art we will make this school year!!

You can stop reading now, as this is the major updates for the studio.

For anyone interested you can keep reading and I will give a deeper dive into an update with my son and everything that happened in the last year.

Well it’s been a year. There were some complications after the surgery. Callum had an excessive build up of fluid after and it lead to him have a partially collapsed lung and a hernia. This left him on oxygen longer and and just delayed getting him out of ICU and bring him home. But we got through that. At home care was intense. We had a nurse that came daily to administer medication through a kind of IV called a PICC line. Difference is it goes more directly to the heart. The risk of infection was great and we had to be very careful and sanitize everything daily, including Callum. But somehow we got through that without infection. We did however have many issues with the line itself as it turns out they don’t make them for babies, so the line didn’t fit the curve of his body and internally kept popping out of place and blocking the line. That brought us to the ER twice. He also had an Ng tube for awhile and we had to teach him to eat my mouth again. Just before Christmas we stopped needing the NG tube. In January we got that PICC line out. I took a giant sigh of relief.

Things went smoothly for a while. Then one of the two virus that are not a threat to most children and adults but is especially to transplant babies started to increase in number. With going back on to anti viral medication that eventually went away. We also were having issues with low hemoglobin and after an endoscopy they found an ulcer. That was in late winter. Once we stopped the anti viral medication common virus number two spiked up this spring. This can turn into a specific form of lymphoma that only occurs in transplant patients. An other endoscopy was done and it was close. He was on the verge of getting lymphoma. With one part luck, Callum appearing some have some natural resistance and the medical team’s intervention we are fortunate to say we avoided having to go down the path of dealing with lymphoma. But it will remain a possibility going forward. But the risk will lessen. That was July. So not going to lie that kind of ruined the summer.

Problem was there was still the mystery of why both is iron and hemoglobin was dropping. Callum had had to have 6 blood transfusions, one every month. We finally have an answer. He is having a reaction to the anti rejection medication. It’s causing white blood cells to clump together and make sores that he has blood loss from in his GI tract and also block his absorption of nutrients depending on where these white blood cells cluster. We are currently treating this buying time until he can change medications to one that will likely not cause this secondary chronic condition. We can do this in October and hopefully it will go away.

Now for the good news. Callum despite it all is doing great!!!! His liver is doing wonderful. We haven’t had some of the more typical complications. It looks like he won’t be rejecting his new liver, it’s healing nicely, and practically functioning in the normal range in less then a year post transplant which is amazing. He reached the milestone of crawling. Kids like him often skip crawling. He’s now on his way to walking. It’s so close. He’s a happy normal little boy despite all he’s gone through. He’s still a charmer. He will be around at the studio from time to time. So if you see him give him a wave and a big smile. He’s still working on waving but he will smile back!

See you all soon Katherine!