Thank you everyone who stopped by to see HRH on his birthday, or sent greetings and good wishes. He had a wonderful time with his friends, and is very excited about all his gift certificates and tickets and game cards and art supplies. Well done, troops.
By Friday night whatever had been eating through my spine during the day had ceased, and it was nice to be able to sit back by the fire at the pub and just listen to the conversations going on around me. I did actually have a book in my bag, but I didn’t need to use it.
Speaking of things in my bag, I have lost my sunglasses. This is very upsetting, because I hate sunglasses in general and I have owned this perfect pair for about four years. I had them when I walked from the car to the house after band on Saturday. Now, they are nowhere to be found. I mourn their absence. They may have fallen into the snow, in which case farewell till spring, assuming I’m lucky enough to find them when the piles and piles of snow finally melt, and they’re salvageable. (Look, a Canadian winter. I’d forgotten what those were like.) Lots of snow fell this weekend. HRH shovelled three times, and each time he moved the snow it was as if he hadn’t done so earlier. Today it is very clear outside (and thus the discovery of the loss of my sunglasses). The sun is rising significantly earlier and setting later, and the angle of it has visibly changed in the past week.
I am remarkably reticent about the things that are on my mind these days. I habitually use this journal as well as my other handwritten journals to work out and record how I feel about things, but these days it feels very much like more of the same thing I was feeling yesterday, and the day before that, and haven’t we had these general life problems before a few times too? And on top of that, I am experiencing computer aversion. The two main books on the go right now are frustrating in very different ways. I’ve reached a part of Swan Sister that isn’t very clearly defined in my brain, and while I usually see this as an opportunity to allow my brain to simply create without boundaries (and it is usually a success), this time it’s a major stumbling block. (Imagine, a stumbling block at 30K. You’d think I’d see them coming by this point.) The Poppy book, while now having a pulse again in my work-brain, is a problem because of the Revelation, because to implement it would require an even more drastic overhaul that I had originally expected. I would have to scrap eighty percent of the novel, and throw out most of what makes the plot currently advance. I read the first couple of chapters during Liam’s nap yesterday and it’s good as it is, just not what it needs to be in order to be a complete success. It’s an enjoyable read, but not a Story. I have to think about it a lot more, and this is ungood because what I want to be doing now is actually writing, not planning or rewriting. I may ignore both of them, pull the Pandora book out and start writing the final chapters of that instead. (Because today, ignoring the problems is much easier than trying to work through them and feeling as if I’ve made matters worse by the end of the precious work day. One must choose one’s battles.)
I’ve spent the morning handling correspondence, and doing banking. I’ve crossed half the things of today’s To-Do list. Since I don’t feel particularly interested in elaborating what’s on my mind, I will share Liam-news.
Liam has been singing Twinkle Twinkle an awful lot these days. He has also been requesting it on the cello. We are a little tired of fending him off from giving the cello full-body hugs at high velocity while it is being played, or using the body as a percussive instrument to accompany the bowed music. He informed me that the f-holes were moons the other day.
Yesterday he drew a picture, and by ‘drew’ I mean he scribbled with his markers on a sheet of construction paper on the floor with his Thomas the Tank Engine next to him. When he was done he looked at me and said, “Ati!”, which means Thomas in Liam-Speak. It took me a moment before I realised that he was referring to the set of scribbles. And when I turned it around, it did look remarkably like the engine once he’d pointed it out. I am mildly freaked out by this. I put it up on his door.
Toilet training also proceeds eerily well.
I made delicious homemade pizza Saturday night, and Liam ate an entire slice as well as stealing the pizza bones off my plate. Sunday we went over to HRH’s parents’ home for dinner, where we had excellent prime rib and lovely potatoes, with cauliflower and broccoli in a light cheese sauce. Liam gorged himself on it all like everyone else did, having seconds and thirds of everything. Then he sat on my lap, appropriated my coffee spoon and helped himself to my serving of impressive home-made black forest cake, and ate more of it than I did (I’m not a big fan of cherries in cake; I’ll eat them fresh but that’s pretty much it). He also helped himself to a few spoonfuls of decaf cappuccino.
And now, I will go reheat the final slice of pizza.
Wow, what a miserable day I’m having. It can be over any time, thanks. I don’t much enjoy being mad at the world in general for no particular reason. I should bring a book to the pub tonight so that I don’t have to talk to anyone, or I may ruin their night.
Amazon.co.uk has sent me an email with recommended books I may enjoy, based on previous purchases.
People, where are you all? Post! I’m writing a letter and I need a) distraction, and b) inspiration.
Listening to the recording made of this past band rehearsal, I am frustrated by what sounds like my lack of capability to produce anything remotely close to correct intonation Saturday morning. Sometimes I wish that my instrument was fretted or keyed so that the sound I produce would be more or less exactly the same every time, assuming the overall tuning is correct, as there are fewer things that can go wrong. One of the things I like about the cello is the ability to push a note up or down to lean on accidentals, but the price for this bonus is having no set reference where your fingers have to go to produce a precise sound, which in turn is affected by so many tiny factors that it’s a wonder I ever end up within an eighth of my desired note. Vagaries such as tiny muscle motion, balance, fractional differences in how the instrument is set up each time, length of the endpin, temperature affecting fingers, strings, and instrument structure are often the culprits, but one can’t blame everything on the co-operation of multitude of tiny factors like this. The human element renders machine-like precision impossible, however, and I don’t think machine-like precision makes for very good music anyway. I’d just like my human element to be a bit more on, and a bit less like human error.
I am about to engage in the most mommy-blogging of mommyblogging, so feel free to skip this. If it had happened six hours earlier it would have been part of the twenty-month post.
Midway through January Liam suddenly developed a fascination with babies. “Baby!” he says in a very pleased voice when he sees a photo in a book, packaging featuring a baby, or a real baby. He calls all children under a certain size or age babies, and we haven’t yet managed to teach him that toddlers are kids or children. They’re all “baby!”. Shopping is a lot of fun because of this. It’s also entertaining because of the chipper “Hello!” and “Bye bye!” he directs to various other shoppers and staff as he passes them.
This month Liam learned about the moon. He asked about it while driving home from daycare one day, when the first sliver of the crescent was low in the western sky. He already knew ‘stars’, so I had to explain that it wasn’t a star. Now he looks for the moon every day. I love to hear him say “moon” (followed by pointing up), and sometimes “Lady” (also followed by pointing up, unless he’s talking about one of his trains!), and “stars” (insert pointing up here, too). After he learned the word ‘moon’ he kept pointing up during the day and saying “moon!”, so we tried for two weeks to get him to understand that the sun is what we see in the sky during the day. For a while it felt like a scene out of The Taming of the Shrew: “Moon!” “No, it’s the sun. ” “Moon!” “No, Liam, really, it’s the sun.” “MOON!” Now he says ‘sun’ properly when he looks up during the day, although he’s having great difficulty understanding that the moon is in a different place at a different time every night. And I can completely understand that; the “inconstant moon” must be a huge challenge for toddlers who are struggling with object permanence. I have no idea what we’ll do when he sees the moon in the daytime sky for the first time.
At the beginning of February I gave him his very first doll. He’s crazy about The Little Mermaid in any form, so when I found a soft Ariel doll with a pleasant face I picked her up. Liam absolutely loves her. He tried to get her out of her box like crazy in the store and while I was getting him out of his coat at home, but when I finally undid all the threads and wires and held her out, he stood shyly on the other side of the room and just looked at her for a while. I cuddled her and stroked her hair, then asked him if he would like to hug her. He nodded and sidled over, touched her hair and laid his cheek gently against her. Then he grabbed her by the foot and off they went. Liam made her a bed from her box right away, fed her crackers, and stroked her hair. He demanded to sleep with her for his nap, and sat with her on my lap for his pre-nap stories, then proceeded to take her with him in the car to pick up HRH that afternoon. That day he added her to the menagerie of companions in the turtle tent with him. Like BunBun and his little wooden Thomas the Tank Engine, ‘Mermy’ is now a member of the family. (We have managed to keep her out of the bath so far, however, unlike Thomas.)
One day while Liam was singing to himself HRH listened with a focused look on his face, then leaned in and said, “Liam, are you singing the alphabet song?” Liam just grinned. So HRH started singing it, and Liam grinned even more. In the car later that day it happened again. He loves that he can start singing, and we can join in. To calm him down in the car the other afternoon I sang “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to him, followed by the alphabet song, and “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, with several variations on harmony. I stopped because I was tired, and I was sitting at a red light when from the back seat I heard “twinkle twinkle”, followed by a pause, then “twinkle twinkle” again. I looked in the mirror to see him grinning at me, singing his version of the song. So we sang “twinkle twinkle”-pause-“twinkle twinkle”-pause together all the rest of the way home.
New words this month include mermaid, broom, castle, cantaloupe, flag, blue, table, butter, and people. He now attempts Pasley’s name, calling her “Lablie”. He also says “purple”, thanks to Jan. And speaking of Jan, when we give him toast with a bit of jam on it he says “Nm-mmm,” and we say, “It’s jam.” “Jan!” he says, pointing up at the framed photo of t!, Jan, HRH, and I with Death and Taxes from the wedding last May. New foods include parsnips (with which he was so enamoured that he picked all of them out of his stew and left the carrots!), and Minigo fruit-flavoured yoghurts (which, curiously enough, don’t make me gag like regular yoghurt does). I laugh whenever I hear him say “tea!” in a perky voice followed by reaching for a teacup, either real or from his toy tea set.