Author Archives: Autumn

Twenty-Two Months Old!

Among the new words this month are shadow, flying, dancing, bump, egg, bacon, animals, bike, tools, tunnel, the end, fire, storm, lightning, tools, bike, knock-knock, crane, draw. HRH got him to call Thomas ‘Tom’ instead of ‘Ati’ the other day. It hasn’t stuck yet, though. ‘Noddles’ have now properly become ‘noodles’. Numbers are really sinking in as a concept, although sequence hasn’t. When we ask him to count the wheels on a toy, he touches each of them in turn saying, “Wheel, wheel, wheel, wheel.” If we begin counting with “One”, he’ll often say “Two”, but then the next number is usually nine. Yesterday after I had put him to bed I heard him counting: “Two, two, two, two, two…”.

He’s really passionate about drawing (which, like his love for books, comes as no surprise, I’m sure). He has a thick little copybook in which he draws with his markers, and I love that we’ll be able to keep this book and look back at it. It has a photo of Sesame Street characters on the front, so when he wants to draw he runs to the shelf and says, “Ernie, Ernie, Ernie.” These days he’s very excited about trees: he draws them on his own, and asks HRH and I to draw tree outlines for him to colour in. Naming the colours is coming along too. Cool colours tend to default to ‘green’, though, and warm colours default to ‘yellow’, although just to keep things fresh he throws ‘purple’ and ‘blue’ and ‘brown’ in at random times. We tried to bring the crayons out again, but with his need to gnaw on things to ease the pressure of his molars it was still a no-go. That’s fine; the markers are great, so long as he doesn’t bite the thick tips off, and he likes taking breaks every ten minutes or so to wash his hands clean of the ink.

He can voluntarily point out and correctly name the letter B. Why that letter and not another, we do not know.

Last week on a sunny day Liam discovered shadows. He now chases his own shadow, and moves his arms and head so that he can see his shadow copy the motion. This is hilarious to him, and entertainment for us as well, I must admit.

The fact that we have multiple friends called Marc/Mark makes him very suspicious.

His current book obsession is the collection of the first three Mog the Forgetful Cat stories I have. He is also very fond of Moonbeam on a Cat’s Ear by Marie-Louise Gay. My copy is signed so I try to be careful with it, but in the end, it’s a children’s book, with all that implies. After reading a story a couple of times in a row he’ll often take my index finger and touch it to various items on the page, waiting for me to identify them. I love how he devours books so completely. He also likes to read a lovely little book called I Love You Sun, I Love You Moon: We say, “I love you…” and he fills in whatever the child on the page is looking at. “Sun! Moon! Wolf! Water! Bird! Tree!” He’s working on saying “I love you” instead of just “love”, too, but at the moment it’s more exciting to say the name of whatever is in the picture.

This month also saw the longest sentence he’s said so far: “No Dada, please down.” Remarkably coherent and cogent, particularly since it was said through a flood of tears and great distress at being buckled back into the carseat.

The snow vanished rather quickly (thank goodness), and we have rediscovered how good Liam is on his feet. Last fall we weren’t comfortable with letting him run around in the driveway or sidewalk, but now suddenly he’s a little boy walking along while holding our hands, or climbing the front stairs on his own, or pushing the stroller with us. HRH likes to take him out into the backyard and let him run around like a mad thing. (Thank goodness for the backyard.)

He gallops through the house chanting his name over and over, throwing “Me!” into the mix every now and again. When he looks in the mirror after a bath he says, “Me! Liam!” and sounds very satisfied about it. And he’s already developing an amusing method of deflection. “Liam, are you dong [insert questionable activity in which he’s not supposed to engage here, such as climbing on the couch or touching the earth in the plants]?” we’ll say. “No,” he’ll say casually, and turn to look at a cat.

His current favourite toys are the MegaBloks. He loves to make towers and “nunnels” for his cars and trains to drive through. He’s remarkably good at stacking them, and at choosing colours and sizes. On top of a structure the other day he built a stack of single unit blocks about five high, and put a two-unit block on the top. He looked at HRH and said, “Flag.” “Uh, yes,” said HRH, and freaked out quietly as Liam turned to do something else.

Peanut butter has been introduced to Liam’s diet. It’s very okay. Not I-won’t-eat-anything-else brilliant, but acceptable.

When he was fractious last week we sat him down to watch the beginning of the first Harry Potter film to take his mind off his teeth, and while the owls were interesting and the Hogwarts Express was thrilling, they were nowhere near as exciting as Madam Hooch’s class. “Broom!” he said, very excited. “Yes,” we said, “brooms.” And he ran off to get his little broom, brought it back into the living room, and went right up to the television and held it up across the screen. “Broom! Up!” he said, very pleased. And then his eyes nearly fell out of his head when those broomsticks flew. “Broom! Fly! Sky!” he said, racing back to me on the chesterfield, turning to lean his back against me and breathlessly take it all in. We caught him trying to walk with his broom between his legs later. The only show he watches with regularity now is Zoboomafoo, which he loves. (The TV is now turned off after Zoboo and before Thomas because of the new morning schedule, which is just fine with me as I have seen enough of the island of Sodor to last me a good long time.)

We took him out to see the Easter farm at the mall last weekend. He was very squirmy, partially because of all the people, partially because of his teeth, partially because he wants to walk everywhere now. He saw donkeys, and all sorts of fancy chickens, rabbits, rambunctious piglets, ducklings, and goats. In the goat pen there were two relatively newborn kids curled up together in the shelter of a set of steps, and I pointed them out to Liam, telling him that they were babies and they were sleeping. “Goats! Night-night goats!” he said while waving, then insisted that we back away and leave the animals so that they could sleep in peace. I’m sure the goats appreciated the thought, as the act itself was lost in the sea of people and associated people-noises.

Originally, we were supposed to travel to Oakville for the holiday weekend, but with my full-time two-week contract and only one day off for the holiday, it wasn’t going to happen: a day of travel, one day there, and another day of travel home is a recipe for family-wide disaster. So that trip has been postponed to later in the month, post-contract, and we spent Easter Sunday with the locals instead. Liam was thoroughly gifted there with clothes, little books, a stuffed turtle and a small Lightning McQueen toy that he hasn’t let go of except in sleep. And when he ran into his bedroom there, he found what he delightedly called “a bike!“, a plastic three-wheeled ride-on toy with a trailer attached. Once he’d figured out how to drive it by pushing it along with his feet and steering, he gave his toys rides for the rest of the day.

I miss him while I’m working on this contract. And yet, it gives me the opportunity to see him in a completely different light now that I’m away from him all day, and come home in time to share dinner with him and the evening ritual of bath, pyjamas, and snuggling with books before bedtime. It reinforces how much of a little boy he is, how well he uses language to communicate what he’s done all day, what a cheerful nature he has, and how much I love his personality.

Day Off

I’m glad it’s a holiday weekend and I have an extra day off. Conversely, this takes a day off what I’ll be invoicing the company for this contract. On Friday I tried to e-mail the file to myself from the work address to put some time into it today, but it hasn’t come through. I have a feeling the corp filters may have decided it was Not Allowed because another message without attachments I sent made it to my home inbox. Ah well; I tried.

Band was impressively awesome on Saturday. Easter dinner over at HRH’s parental home was lovely on Sunday. Sleeping in until seven this morning was blissful.

There is surprisingly little chocolate in the house. This ought to be remedied.

We went out this morning for groceries and other stuff, and I finally found a cap for Liam despite his stubborn refusal to try them on. This one appears to be acceptable; at least he keeps it on his head half the time right now. All four of Liam’s molars are making white bumps on his back gums, as HRH found out when he braved the Toddler Jaws of Doom to put Orajel on them yesterday. No wonder the poor child is cranky.

Scattershot

Thought I’d kicked the cold; then the really bad dry throat thing kicked in yesterday afternoon, triggering really bad coughing fits complete with tears streaming from the eyes. HRH had to import the humidifer from Liam’s room into our bedroom so that I could sleep last night. Also no fun were the sharp, incredibly painful foot cramps that attacked after I stepped onto the cold bathroom tiles on my way to bed. So, I’m still sick. Also, it is winter again, and I would like these two things to be over and done with, thank you.

Still enjoying work in an intellectual/practical challenge sort of way. More with the tearing of the hair and exasperated gestures and sighs, though, as I encounter words that I expect to be nouns and that are defined as verbs, such as ‘paint’. That’s all right; I fit right in with the gesticulation and random oaths uttered by programmers and coders around me.

Thanks to public transport this week, I have read Conspiracy by Grace, Lady Cavendish; Melusine by Sarah Monette; and The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason in their entirety.

t! has been sharing excellent music with me lately. I’m currently enjoying some Lee Rocker and Brian Setzer Orchestra live recordings. Rockabilly and swing revival are seeing me through.

All right; time to pack the Thermos of tea and finish getting ready to go.

Wednesday

Poor Liam; those two-year-old molars are really bothering him this week. Today he slept dreadfully during his nap, and he’s already woken up crying once tonight. Normally I wait until it sounds like he really is awake and needs reassuring, and nine times out of ten he falls asleep on his own again, but tonight I went in not long after he called for me and cried briefly, even though it sounded like he was settling down again. We snuggled in the armchair together and he fell asleep almost immediately. I sat there with this long boy on my lap in the dark, his head on my shoulder, feeling his warmth and his weight, and wondering when my baby became a boy. It’s been ages since I cuddled him back to sleep; it’s not something I do often, but tonight I just wanted to be with him for a bit.

I attended my first group meeting at work this afternoon. I learned a lot: namely the new delivery schedule, key personnel shifts, and so forth, and am now a lot more aware of how the project is structured and what it entails, as well as gaining a better idea of What It Means (to the market, to the end user, to the company, etc.). I am in absolute awe of this producer who juggles the entire show, and juggles it with poise. Two platforms, both still relatively new, QA, product testing, basic design, the needs of the administration, the needs of the team, the needs of the market… he’s a very capable, principled, and well-grounded man. I also learned that everyone in the room is a member of the team. There are about forty people. This is a small team compared to other projects in the company, I know, but I hadn’t realised the extent of the manpower required. I simply hadn’t thought about it before.

I finished cutting a ruthless swathe of pink-highlighted-destruction through the supplemental dictionary today, and began to look at the main dictionary for words to strike out and/or edit. I am already tearing my hair out — it has ‘backward’ and ‘backwards’ (well, not any more, because I marked one for deletion because of its derogatory definition), but not ‘forward’. I’m suffering from a lot of double takes and “you can’t be serious” and “wha?” sorts of gestures and utterings of exasperation. (There was a mild ripple of relief that ran through some of the team when I was obliquely introduced as the contractor bringing the dictionary up to par during the meeting. Every hour I am there I come to better understand why this reaction is common when I am introduced and my purpose is made known.)

One of the benefits of working in a mostly male environment is that the women’s bathrooms are always empty. And clean.

Note to self: Don’t wear the zip-up stacked heel ankle boots to work again. They have hard soles, and they click when I walk. (See above re: mostly male environment. I’m uncomfortable with the high-heel click, especially since I tend to walk quickly or decisively, and these are mainly hardwood floors. Loud noise tends to call attention to she who makes it, and I’m not big on the calling attention thing.)

I got lost trying to find the cafeteria to fetch hot water for tea today. Thank goodness for helpful maintenance staff.

One of the neat things about working on-site for this contract is that Meallanmouse and I make a point of walking out of the building every day for lunch. So far she has introduced me to three excellent restaurants with very affordable lunch specials and delicious food (bonus: all healthy). Otherwise I would be eating at my desk and that is bad for my brain, my productivity, and my health, quite frankly. Hurrah for friends who poke me, and keep me social and clear-minded.

Enough; bath, and bed.

Tired Professional Editor Girl

Day Two: many words have fallen to my pink highlighting bar of doom. If only I was permitted to edit to the extent to which I wish to edit! Then I would be in heaven. But there are rights issues.

We did a beautiful full moon ritual tonight. I have missed group ritual.

In other news, I have a new (secondhand) cell phone. Of course, since the provider website won’t recognise my credit card because it claims I’m not typing in the correct address registered to the card, I can’t do more than activate it until I go out and buy a top-up card. Sigh. At least now I’ll know what time it is when I’m on public transport. (I lost my Eeyore watch! I cannot find it anywhere! I am very sad indeed.)

Very tired. Going to bed now.

Day One, On-Site Professional Editor Girl

So! Here I am, at home after my first day of the bright shiny on-site contract. I am working on the floor with the team as opposed to working somewhere else, which is both good and bad. The sound and movement around me is mildly distracting, even when I have my headphones on, but time moves quickly and people are right there when I have a question.

Things I have learned:

French keyboards and I do not get along. (This is, alas, also true of my new-to-me laptop.)

Public transport is a temporal black hole.

The heads of the team do not actually know the specifics of what they want me to do, other than to integrate two databases, and to make things better. Fortunately I too want to make things better. Most of today was spent feeling my way through the material to get a really good handle on what needs to be done.

Everyone — and I mean everyone — takes lunch. I am unused to this, as the last time I had an on-site job it was in retail where we usually worked through lunch, or only took as long as necessary to bolt food before going back to handle the pile of tasks that needed to be done.

I need a snack at around three-thirty or four, or I get wonky around the time I leave.

Things I accomplished today:

Around mid-afternoon I discovered that 25% of what I was going to classify and correct was already in the main file. I am very, very glad I figured this out before I worked for a few days and discovered that everyone’s time had been wasted. Also, it reassured me that the way I was editing things was good, because my corrections ended up matching what was in the main file most of the time. The designer whipped up a formula thingy to compare/sort (I’m the word girl, not the tech girl) and I now have an annotated list that clearly identifies what in the new file is (a) already in the main dictionary, and (b) what isn’t. Yay me for locating and identifying that particular potential disaster for everyone. Tomorrow is a new day with that pitfall out of the way, and first thing I shall be sitting down with one of the heads and making a very detailed list of what they want me to do, in the order it ought to be done. This seems a very free-flow sort of project and work environment, and very flexible, but I have a limited time in which to do this for them and I need to pin down a less-vague system that will work for both parties, to be used as a reliable checklist but that will still be organic for everyone.

I have a desk, and a computer, and internal e-mail, and passwords, and all sorts of official things. And all this was operational about an hour after I arrived. Impressive. I only got my keycard mid-afternoon, though, so it’s a good thing I had friends who could use theirs to swipe me back into my top-secret room after lunch.

I ate lunch. (This is a big thing for me. Everyone leaving the floor at noon is an excellent reminder.) Meallanmouse will keep me on the lunch-track, hurrah!

Memorable things:

Baronscartop: “Those guys are totally checking you out.” Heard not once but twice while on the casual ‘this is where you work’ tour first thing in the morning, one on each floor. I am so oblivious to these sort of things. Nice to have friends who can point it out to me.

Not having butterflies in my stomach at any time. Yes, I know what I’m doing, and yes, I have confidence in my abilities and my adaptability. It’s just odd to be put in an alien environment and realise this, as opposed to working in one’s home office and letting the awareness sift to far below the conscious surface for long periods of time.

Also: The smaller contract that I worked on at the end of last week and this Sunday appears to be satisfactory to the client. Yay me, again. Much with the yayness, in fact.

Feeling Misanthropic

Well, this afternoon was a complete waste of gas and oxygen. I have none of the things I went out for, because they were out of stock or there were too many people in line or the sales flyers had been misleading. “See how many bags I do not have,” I said to HRH when he asked how the shopping trip had gone.

Also, people are stupid and inconsiderate — not that this is a news flash or anything. But if one more person stopped dead in the doorway to a shop while chatting on their cell phone or in the middle of the concourse for no reason, oblivious to anyone else moving around them, I was going to run them down with the stroller.

Bah.

I am tired but not sleepy, I look like death warmed over, I have no voice thanks to this cold, we’re about to embark upon a week of rainy weather, and I start a new job tomorrow. At least I get to look forward to lunch out with friends.