Category Archives: Weather, Seasons, & Celebrations

Owlet Update, 37 weeks

For those greedy for precise info: Yesterday’s prenatal revealed that I am 1 cm dilated and 50% effaced, and my OB said that the baby’s head was right there against the cervix, ready to go (I could have told her that; she lowered right after the last appointment two weeks ago and has been headbutting the cervix with great verve ever since). “Votre accouchement prendra place comme une charme,” my OB said with great delight. I swear, she’s more excited about how this is going than I am. I’m finally at the one prenatal appointment a week till the end point, so we’ll see where we are next week. Of course, we all know that dilation and effacement aren’t reliable signposts and that things can mysteriously reverse themselves, but physically I was already feeling Stuff Happen, so it’s nice to hear her confirm my suspicions.

For everyone else: Hey, I’m going to have a baby in a couple of weeks. That’s about all we know, because while there are certain signs that a baby’s body and a gestating mother’s body are headed in the right direction for birthing, no one really knows what triggers labour to happen whenever it does, though there are lots of theories. Also, hey, did you know that an estimated due date isn’t anything more than a guess based on a couple of charts put together by some doctor decades ago? A precise science this is not. A baby is considered On Time if it’s born two weeks before or after the EDD (why yes, that does mean a four-week spread, and yes, that’s kind of stressful if you’re trying to plan anything). This is why we’ve been telling people a rough time period instead of an actual date when they ask. And really, with all the adjustments back and forth being made to my EDD for various reasons, I’m just as glad we went that route, because otherwise people would be terribly confused by this point.

The renos upstairs proceed apace. HRH goes back to work next Wednesday, and while he’d like to be further along in the attic conversion, that would be logistically impossible. He’s done an incredible amount in the month he’s had, and his dad has been right there with him. The roof insulation is pretty much done, the wiring is all there just waiting for an electrician to check and connect it (waiting for replies from electricians = annoying), and HRH even took a day to run a duct up from the basement so that there would be air conditioning up there. That had to be done, really, because otherwise it was a sauna and the environment was unworkable. Not that the a/c actually makes the room cool, what with humidex temperatures of 48 C this week and working directly under a dark roof being baked by the sun, but it does make it somewhat more bearable. Plasterboard can be screwed to the wall framing at night after work once the wiring is approved and connected (c’mon, electricians!) and then it’s mudding and painting, and then it’s essentially done. If we can swing it and the sales are still on, HRH wants to put a floating laminate floor in instead of pouring three coats of paint on the plywood floor, too.

We have a car seat that fits our vehicle now (that was one of those Kind Of Important Things we had to handle quickly a week or so ago when we discovered that the incredibly awesome luxury car seat we borrowed from Miranda was too big to fit our car for safe and regular use), and we got the lightweight Snap n’Go stroller frame we wanted, too (we borrowed one six years ago and they’re brilliant; they’re much lighter and smaller than a true stroller, and you just snap the car seat into it). Best thing is we got them both on excellent sale, and they’re the only new items we’ve had to buy for this baby. And the resale value on the stroller frame is awesomely high, which means we’ll be able to recoup almost all of what we paid for it, tra la la.

More handmade show and tell!

Cate knit this absolutely fantastic Tweed baby blanket for the Owlet:

I forgot to post photos of the lace baby cap I knit (my first real lace project!). It needs a proper ribbon, as this is a temporary braid of yarn:

And here is the blanket I wove last weekend (which obviously did not work to trick the Owlet out). I love how the thick and thin single-ply yarn creates the texture and visual interest here with just a plain weave:

I think that’s it for now.

Canada Day Concert Announcement!

You know the Canada Day concert is coming up, right?

On Friday July 1 the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra will be giving a free (yes, free!) concert as part of the overall Canada Day celebrations in conjunction with Pointe-Claire Village. We do this every year, and it’s always terrific fun. Our conductor is the justly famed Stewart Grant, who is phenomenal.

This year’s energetic programme features:

    Mozart: Magic Flute overture
    Schubert: Unfinished Symphony
    Strauss Jr: Emperor Waltz
    Strauss Sr: Radetzy March
    Strauss Jr: Pizzicato Polka
    Strauss Jr: Die Fledermaus overture

The concert begins at 20h00. As always, this Canada Day concert is being presented at St-Joachim church in Pointe-Claire Village, located right on the waterfront at 2 Ste-Anne Street, a block and a half south of Lakeshore Road. The 211 bus from Lionel-Groulx metro drops you right at the corner of Sainte-Anne and Lakeshore. Here’s a map to give you a general idea. I usually encourage those facing public transport to get together and coax a vehicle-enabled friend along by offering to buy them an ice cream or something. It works nicely, and it’s fun to go with a group. And hey, you can’t beat the price. Be aware that if you’re driving, parking will be at a premium because of the whole Canada Day festivities thing going on. Give yourself extra time to find a parking place and walk to the church, which will be packed with people.

As it’s a holiday, the village will be full of various celebrations, booths, food stalls, and the like. You might want to come early and enjoy what’s going on.

Free classical music! Soul-enriching culture! And as an enticing bonus, the fireworks are scheduled for ten PM, right after we finish, and the church steps are a glorious spot from which to watch them. Write it on your calendar, tell all your friends and family members! The more the merrier!

And a random observation: You know you’ve got just about a month to go before your baby’s born when you’ve extended the cello’s endpin as far as it can go to make a more pronounced angle so that the back of the instrument doesn’t lie on your bump, and as a result the fingerboard angle is all wrong and your shifts and basic intonation go into the toilet.

(Or maybe that’s just me.)

One more dress rehearsal! One more concert on Canada Day! And then I can hang my bow up and put my cello in its box stand till a couple of weeks after the baby is born. I just have to make it through the next ten days…

Farewell To Kindergarten

Yesterday afternoon all three kindergarten classes got together and presented a little concert for their parents, got certificates, and then there was cake.

It’s the boy’s last day of kindergarten today:

It seems like only yesterday that he was off to school for the first time…

I’m a wee bit wistful, and tremendously proud. His teacher told us his reading skills were far beyond his grade level (which doesn’t surprise us, because we read to him all the time, and he will read any text he can; if we put cereal boxes on the table he’d read them, but we don’t, so he reads things like CD spines and flyers that come in the mail and the company information on passing trucks as well as books). He’s doing addition and subtraction, things I didn’t grasp until the middle of grade one, and, perhaps most of all, I am proud of the thoughtful, sensitive little citizen he’s become.

Six Years Old!

Six years ago today, during a humid heatwave, we unexpectedly found ourselves with someone who wasn’t scheduled to arrive till after the Wicca book proofs were handed in um till after the first draft of the green witch book had been handed in er till the nursery was ready well till we were fully unpacked from the move for another nine weeks.

One…

Two…

Three…

Four…

Five…

SIX!

Six years ago he was born nine weeks early, and we’ve been trying to keep up with him ever since. (That thing about preemies sometimes being slower at milestones and having to adjust gestational/chronological age expectations? Totally untrue in our case.)

Our boy can read; there is no keeping anything secret in written form any more. He hangs over the back of my desk chair and reads forum posts or e-mails I write aloud ( “Why did you say that? What does that mean?”). His Nana and Granddad bought him a subscription to Chickadee magazine, and he reads the joke pages to us with great gusto. He is a wizard with Lego kits (particularly with the 8-12 range) and also with designing his own stuff. He runs, jumps, climbs, asks insightful yet difficult questions, eats a lot (two breakfasts are de rigeur in our household), and grows about an inch a month, or so our eyes and the jeans we had to roll up a few months ago and now show his anklebones tell us. He writes very well and clearly, and his drawing skills have exploded this past year.

He is cheerful, positive, and optimistic. He has a very healthy sense of self-worth and justice, for which I am very grateful. At the same time, over the past year we’ve seen him develop a different kind of self-awareness that has led to uncertainty about some of his skills, something I think is due mainly to being in school and comparing himself to others. He very definitely has a tendency to not want to try something at all if he thinks he’ll fail at it, which is why he still can’t successfully ride his two-wheeler bike alone. We support him and encourage him as much as we can, but ultimately he has to feel ready to take a new step himself.

He hopped into our bed at 5:45 this morning to open his presents. The baby gave him a Thor action figure. He was awestruck and wanted to know how the baby (a) knew he liked Thor (we are all big mythology fans as well as comics fans) and (b) told us to buy it when she was still inside me! We gave him a copy of Lego Clone Wars for the Xbox, which he had put on his Official Birthday List.

Both sets of grandparents are coming over for a family party in about half an hour, and everything is either prepped for supper or being handled by other people so I intended to sit back and have a nice relaxed afternoon. I made an ice cream cake at the boy’s request (designed by him, too: Oreo cookie crumb crust, a layer of vanilla ice cream, a layer of homemade peanut butter sauce, a layer of chocolate ice cream, homemade chocolate ganache on top, and there will also be whipped cream dolloped atop each slice), so I’m looking forward to that as well.

Also, this morning we had a fabulous dress rehearsal for our cello recital tomorrow. It’s been a really good day so far, and I imagine it will only get better.

Away Time

I am swamped with work and countdown to this weekend’s recital, so I haven’t been here and won’t really be for the next week, either. I’m late on my Books Read in May roundup, and that has to wait, too. Short form:

– Lovely weather, but as is expected the humidity rising, so there are good days and bad days.

– The boy turns six on Saturday, and has a school field trip to a local national park for frog and butterfly exploration on Friday. They had caterpillars in class to observe in the latter half of May, and the kids saw them make chrysalises and hatch into beautiful Painted Lady butterflies, which the class released last week. Very exciting.

– The boy finally realised what playing in a recital meant at his lesson last Saturday, and there were some tears because it would be different from his usual environments of lessons and home practice. His teacher worked with him sensitively and they changed his piece to a duet with her; we also scheduled him to be second, so he isn’t playing first and alone.

– Owlet is doing fine, and passed her brother’s gestational record of 31w2d this past weekend. Go Owlet! I am exhausted and in pain a lot of the time, which isn’t a surprise considering the stupid amount of growth that was accomplished in a very short time on top of my pre-existing fibro and scoliosis issues.

– Also this weekend, there were suddenly a half-flight of stairs, a landing, and a big hole in the ceiling to the attic. Next up: Plywood floor, framing walls, vapour barrier and ventilation layer, lifting insulation, plasterboard. Windows have to be installed in there somewhere, and wiring run to be certified by an electrician.

– Did I mention I am swamped with work? I handed in the copyediting gig, but now it is all bird book rewrites all the time, and I am having panic attacks at the amount of work that needs to be done by Friday night. Technically I have to hand it in on Monday morning at 8 or 9 AM, but I won’t be able to work on it all weekend because of dress rehearsal, guests, birthday party, and recital, so Friday’s the deadline.

– We have a lead on a secondhand 1/8 cello for the boy at an insanely low price. It’s in Ottawa, so we’ll trundle down there for a day trip the last week of June and check it out, as well as visiting the redone Museum of Nature and walking through the Parliament buildings. Even if it needs new strings and a bow rehair (both of which I fully expect) it will still be less expensive than the other secondhand one listed here in Montreal.

Right; back into the fray. Wish me sanity and an even head.

Owlet Update

I booked all of yesterday off, because the past few appointments I’ve had have taken more than all morning, and trying to squeeze scheduled work in after that and before the boy got home was just stressing me out. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and hot but with a decent breeze to offset the growing humidity. I dare say I’d have been less happy about it if the maternity wing of my hospital wasn’t air conditioned, but it is, so I spent the morning in relative comfort.

This time my wait was only an hour and a half long, and my appointment was very positive. Owlet has done some serious work, growing five weeks’ worth in two weeks (hello, 30-week growth spurt). She went from being three weeks behind to bang on target, all of her measurements coming in at an average of 30w5d (which was a day shy of where we were). She has shifted from a transverse position to head-down, and the placenta is in awesome shape and position. She weighs about 1658 grams, which is almost exactly what the boy weighed when he was born. My body is still showing zero signs of potential labour. “Congratulations,” my doctor said as she started to put the monitors away. “You are officially no longer considered a high-risk pregnancy. Keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s obviously working.”

I am no longer considered high-risk! WOO-HOO!

All the good vibes (thanks, everyone!), bed rest, progesterone treatment, and extra ice cream have obviously worked. This is wonderful news for me, because as of today I’m at 31 weeks, the precise point where things went wrong last time with the boy. The “keep doing what you’re doing” instruction is rather key, though, so I’m keeping to the reduced activity. She didn’t tell me light bed rest was off the schedule, so I’m not throwing myself back into running around with the boy and doing grocery shopping or extended errands again.

While I was there, I made an appointment for a hospital tour in three weeks. I’m excited about it, because this is one of those lacunae in my experience. I mean, I’m very familiar with the high-risk clinic, and the ultrasound rooms, the first contact emergency area, and their nursery where the boy was transferred after his stay in NICU, but nothing else. They gave me a choice of June 26 or July 24, and maybe it’s just me, but July 24 felt like cutting it a wee bit close for comfort. So I’ll finally get to see my hospital’s labour and delivery rooms.

I got home around noon and managed to get an hour and a half of work done before I had to stop. See? Scheduling the day off and getting work done anyway feels like a major bonus or score somehow, like finding billable hours where you didn’t think there were any. I also made myself sit down and do an hour of heavy work on all my cello recital pieces, since work and bed rest had my practice record rather, erm, spotty in the two previous weeks and my performance at the group class last Sunday showed it. And once the boy got home, I finished spinning the first half of the BFL/silk for the lace cap, too, and started the second half. So it was a remarkably productive day.

I also went to orchestra last night for the first time after missing two weeks, and it was a wonderful evening. We were in a different rehearsal location, and it was very pleasant. We could never afford it on a regular basis, but it would be nice if we could. It’s where the youth orchestra practices, and when our conductor called break he encouraged us to engage in one of their rituals, heading to the local parlour on the corner to indulge in homemade ice cream. It would have been lovely, but rushed, and my wallet was also empty. And besides, the celli were all comforting one of our section, who slipped on the stairs on the way up the stars to the rehearsal room and smashed his cello.

I’m achy this morning, which is totally understandable, since I did more yesterday than I have done in ages. I also didn’t sleep very well, because the windstorm that blew down trees and power lines yesterday (and our metal gazebo in the backyard, which I am fervently hoping is salvageable) rattled our bedroom window all night and there was a cat bent on waking us up at all hours with aggressive purring in the face. I think I can just about finish the copyediting assignment I have today, though, since I hit roughly the halfway point yesterday. I can certainly get close enough to the end that I can wrap it up and probably send it back tomorrow (yay, more invoicing), leaving me all of next week for the bird book rewrites. I may leave myself open for one more copyediting assignment, but then I’ll book off for a couple of months and initialize my QPIP maternity benefits (which became available to self-employed workers the year after I had the boy, thank you, Quebec… although they don’t make it easy to figure it all out if you don’t get tax receipts, which I don’t, as I’m paid freelance from the US; I’ll be using the last two years of net income as reported on my taxes as source numbers).

Today: Thirty-one weeks of pregnancy. Between five and nine to go.

Mother’s Day Roundup And Other Mothery Stuff

This morning the boy picked up his bow and bowed his fingering exercise. He’d been playing it pizzicato till now, saying that no no no, the bow would be too hard. Today he decided to do it all on his own. I am learning so much about the way he learns by working through his practices with him. And we share experiences, too, like today when we were talking about pivots to cross strings, and he said, “I kept my right wrist really, really still Mama.” I agreed, and said, “You know how your teacher said grown-up cellists still have problems with not moving their bow hand wrists and letting their right elbows direct the movement instead? Mama still has lots and lots of trouble with that.” (Mama was also taught to use her wrist and keep it loose in order to economize energy, as was our current teacher, so we’re both working on remembering otherwise; you can see how teaching and playing styles change over the years.) “Really?” he said. “I won’t! When I grow up, I won’t move my wrist at all!”

I love that we share this together. I love that I can hear him humming bits of my recital pieces when I work on them, both during my lesson and when I practice at home, and even at random times when he’s building with Lego or playing with action figures. I love that he’ll play an exercise for me without announcing it and then ask me impishly if I can identify it, and he’s so chuffed when I do. He counts his practice stickers every morning before putting another one on, and it looks like we may hit 100 right around recital time (very exciting!).

He was so excited about Mother’s Day that I got my school artwork on Thursday when he brought it home, a construction paper daffodil and two heart-shaped cards. I was awoken on Saturday morning at 5:45 by a gentle pat and a whispered “Happy Mother’s Day, Mama,” because he couldn’t wait for that, either. On Sunday morning at 7:00 I got another drawing of a heart, and then a silver tray with a cup of tea and a small bouquet of tulips and daffodils from the garden. We’d invited HRH’s parents over for lunch, so I made that lovely cinnamon loaf and a quiche, and my mother-in-law contributed salad and crudités, and fruit to go with the cinnamon loaf for dessert. The food was all lovely, and we sat outside afterwards as the weather was spectacular. I managed to get sun, as the freckles testify. HRH and his dad (who is looking really, really fantastic and recovering well from his bout of very bad health) got to wander around upstairs and bounce ideas for finishing the attic off one another, and ended up on a recon mission to the Home Depot three blocks down that resulted in two perfect windows being brought home, much to everyone’s surprise.

Monday was a ped day. What? You say you thought the boy just had several? So did we. It was marked as conditional on the school calendar, which I didn’t check till this weekend, and I didn’t get an announcement or confirmation from the school beforehand so I went ahead and assumed it was happening. As I’d already put off my second round of blood tests and the glucose challenge test once from last week when I had the dizzy spells, instead of rescheduling it yet again the boy came with me to the hospital yesterday, and his mission was to take care of me. He was very interested in the cold orange drink I was given and asked what it tasted like. I said, “Like melted orange popsicles, with a bit of fizzy to it” and he made a face. We hung out in the snack bar for the hour it took for the glucose test, where he nibbled on the carrots and snow peas we’d brought, and we read a bunch of books. Then we went back to the lab and he held my hand very importantly while they took the blood so that I wouldn’t be afraid. The technicians thought he was adorable for patting my arm and telling me that it wouldn’t hurt and it would be over in just a moment. We came home and had a picnic lunch in the backyard.

I’m starting to feel a little weird. I’m at 27 weeks, and at the hospital they gave me a test to be done at home at 35 weeks. I had my first baby at 31 weeks, six years ago; I don’t know what happens normally after that, what tests are done, when appointments are scheduled. I missed two-thirds of my final trimester, so I have no idea what to expect from it. I’m in the weird position of having experienced labour and delivery, but not in the way I’d expected in the hospital I’d worked with up till that point; I never got to pack a bag or plan out what to do to keep my mind busy in labour, or anything like that. I’ve never even had a hospital tour. I’ve never had my brand new infant in my hospital room with me, or got to take it home with me when I left. It’s all new for me from hereon in till the baby arrives home, at which point I’m back in familiar territory. (I have plenty of experience in dealing with NICU, though, and pumping exclusively for a month to supply my baby with breastmilk, and in dealing with hospital staff and schedules of all kinds.) It’s just a really odd feeling to have this lacuna ahead of me between the two sections of pregnancy/new mum stuff that I know about. I sometimes feel like an imposter when first-time-pregnant women of my acquaintance ask me about the last trimester and new babies. My experience is so different from the norm.

Speaking of this baby, she is really working the kickboxing routine these days. I can’t find a comfortable position for my very adjustable desk chair and the yoga ball I got somehow manages to stress my lower back more rather than less, both of which make for a challenging work sessions. I may ask HRH to get the kneeling chair out of storage; that might work.