Category Archives: Words Words Words

Five Years Old!

Five years ago today, during a humid heatwave that was nothing like the cool damp weather we’re having these days, 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!

Last night after he went to bed I put up some of his party decorations (we’re doing a space theme this year, since he is newly obsessed with the space shuttle) and got his present ready by the side of our bed, because in the past he has bounded into our room for a first-thing-in-the-morning birthday thing. Today HRH had to go scoop him up out of his bed, although I think he was already awake, and carry him to ours, where he burrowed under the covers for a moment before popping upright and saying, “I’m five now!” We sang Happy Birthday to him and gave him his present, and he hugged us both before unwrapping it. Lo and behold, there was the Lego Atlantis submarine he had repeatedly told us he wanted. “You got me what I asked for! Thank you!” he said, and gave us both another huge hug. (The original plan was to get him the Playmobil police station, but he had stuck to the submarine request for a month, so it was clear to us that it was what he really wanted. The station can wait till Christmas.) Then I made pancakes for everyone as a special weekday treat, and I put a birthday candle in the boy’s buttered and maple-syruped stack, which amused him.

His building skills are extraordinary. The educators at school kept a biplane he assembled from Lego, but he can do pretty much anything with any kind of set like Knex or Tinker Toys. It shouldn’t surprise me because HRH is really excellent at three-dimensional modelling, too, but when I get comments from educators I listen a bit more closely. I’m also impressed at how he can follow the instruction booklets, something else HRH has taught him. (I will, however, be the one to teach him how to read the instruction booklets that come with video games, because HRH doesn’t even look at those.) Seriously, I’m going to start hiring him out to assemble Ikea furniture for people, because if he can assemble advanced Lego sets by reading the pictorial instructions, then Ikea furniture should be a breeze.

He has decided that perhaps he will not play the cello after all; perhaps the violin is where he wants to go instead, which is fine. He will probably never know how much of a gift he gave me when I met him after his kindergarten orientation day two weeks ago, and he said, “Mama, I have to show you… there’s a whole music room in this school!” He showed me the piano and touched the keys gently and lovingly, and he would have stood there for an hour with it if HRH hadn’t herded us out. I’m thankful that he loves music enough to want to play anything. The excitement on his face when I told him about the little strings-only music school that runs in the area in which we’re house-hunting was wonderful. Whether he ends up playing the cello like me or a violin, or even branching out into wind or brass instruments, or chooses piano or guitar or percussion, I will support him with love and find the necessary equipment and education. And again, just as I’m not surprised at his three-dimensional modelling and building skills, his love of music doesn’t surprise me either; you learn what’s around you. He makes up songs that are make rhythmic and make metre-sense, knows how to insert words or sounds into existing songs and match the beat, and loves to sing along to soundtracks.

Reading is coming along. He knows how to spell out the word he sees, then sound out each letter (if we can break him of the habit of sounding each letter out twice the way they do on Super Why, it will make hearing the word in his head much easier for him), and he’s starting to break the whole-word pattern down into smaller patterns to sound out. This morning he looked at the Atlantis logo on his Lego box and said, “That almost looks like it spells ‘Atlantis.'” And I give him full marks for that, because the font is highly graphic and the letters don’t look like the ones he’s used to. We had this problem with the Via train logo a few months ago because the A doesn’t have a bar across it, so he knows now that sometimes letters don’t look exactly alike all the time, depending on their design. We’ve been working on sounding things out and recognising repeated words or patterns (like ‘ch’ makes its own unique sound, it’s not ‘k-h’, and the word ‘the’ spells ‘the’ no matter where it is on the page), and he ran to find HRH one day when he read a whole sentence from a Mr. Putter & Tabby book ( “It was summer and the weather was very hot”, just for the record).

Recent films he has been into include The Lion King (and believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve been in the car with the boy singing ‘I Just Can’t Wait to be King’ at the top of his voice, something that makes HRH want to burst with joy) and Atlantis, which has initiated a whole discussion about the Atlantis myth. He looked at us this morning and said, “You mean it’s a real place?”, to which we responded with an explanation of what a legend is. He decided we should build a three-man sub and go looking for it ourselves.

He’s pretty open to any kind of food, except when he’s not, which is typical of any kid, I think. The big stumbling block seems to be tomato sauce. I made him a bechamel-based lasagna that he ate with gusto and complimented me on; the recipe needs refinement, but we’ll work on it. He also has a thing about onions, and doesn’t want them anywhere near his plate. He loves pasta tossed with garlic butter, likes the idea of lobster but passes on it every time, and no longer is interested in salmon or shrimp. He gets excited about pork chops, and has lately been manfully eating the salad we put on his plate. I don’t know when we stopped preparing a separate meal for him in certain cases, but we haven’t done it in ages; he eats what we eat, or he doesn’t eat at all.

We haven’t had a doctor’s appointment since December, but we know he’s about 42 lbs and about a metre plus eight centimetres tall. He wears size 4 or 5 shirts, size 4 pants, and size 11 shoes (!!!). He sleeps about ten hours at night; naps officially ended a month or so ago, although we still suggest one on hard days or when he’s sick and he’s usually willing to do it. Otherwise, quiet time is good.

He’s five now, and as I have previously mentioned I’m going to officially cease the monthly posts here. They’re great records for me, but they take a lot of energy to assemble, so from now on I’m going to do boy-themed posts as they come up instead. I wanted to end this monthly review series with some kind of huge flourish, but instead there’s just the figurative bang of the back door as it closes behind our boy, who has run out into the backyard looking for adventure, leaving us inside with a cup of tea, wondering where the past five years have gone and what the next five will bring.

Thursday Activity Log

Today I:

– cleaned off my desk and filed stuff
– RSVPed to a wedding
– wrote a journal post about cello
– more househunting research
– baked cookies (there wasn’t enough flour to bake bread)
– made frosting and iced the cookies
– started the freelance thing (only one hour; my focus is non-existent)
– final edit on recital programme
– wove another foot of blanket
– watched the 1994 film version of Little Women
– glued the velvet into the cello stand that’s been just lying there for ages

Our agent asked for my househunt spreadsheet. I am amused by this, and kind of proud of myself for having it so we can all keep track of what’s come up, because wow, there have been a lot of properties flying around in this hunt for a house: properties we looked at online and ruled out because of no basement or not enough bedrooms on the same floor or some such thing, houses we asked to see but were already sold or in negotiation, houses we visited and crossed off the list for some reason, and places we visited and approved of. I knew it was time for a spreadsheet when houses started coming up again in searches and we couldn’t remember why they’d been ruled out. Apparently there is a rotten tactic on the part of some agents where they sell the house but don’t mark it as sold so they can net more queries and redirect interested parties to other houses in their portfolio, which explains the lack of ‘sold’ identifier on the listings and my frustration in trying to keep them straight. (Are they sold? Did the negotiations fall through and it’s still on the market? What?)

In Which She Examines The Current Void (And It Probably Evaluates Her As Well)

So my comment spam these days tends to be mortgage and loan related. Ah, keyword searches. Why do I never get exciting cello spam when I drone on about music?

I’m sore all over today from the whiplash the life speed bump we hit yesterday. I know, I know; physical reaction to mental/emotional trauma. Who’d have thought? Fibro aside… well, no, fibro’s part of it, because I’m so drained I can’t bounce back properly. Still. Also, it sucks that therapeutic crying exhausts me. It’s a lose-lose situation.

I was looking forward to rehearsal last night, both to distract me and because I’ve done a lot of cello work this week. Except that exhaustion thing? I muffed things I can do in my sleep, and it was like a bad dream about dominoes or a house of cards: every time the celli were asked to work on a portion of music I got less accurate and dropped out more. Even on the easy stuff. And I sank deeper and deeper into that unavoidable self-loathing/numb detached headspace and general grumpiness at the world, because gods damn it, I practised this stuff, and I played it well at home. Not that it seems to make a difference when I’m playing where and when it counts, and especially not when the conductor turns around and is right in front of me to lead the celli. I just can’t do it at full speed, and it’s really, really frustrating me. We played through one of the hard parts I’d worked on my a lesson a couple of weeks ago and at the end my teacher leaned over and poked me with her bow with an approving nod. I shook my head, and I was so depressed at the end of the night that she sat there and gave me a pep talk. She reminded me of how I work within the rhythm, always being on the beat in hard passages, that I drop the right notes to drop in a run if I can’t get them all, and how I’m in sync with her bow changes. The left hand will get there, she said. She reminded me of how far I’ve come in a year, two years, and I realised that I could probably handle Scheherazade now without the problems I’d had last year. (The Hebrides overture, well, no, and there are some very similar runs in the Reformation symphony, it occurs to me now, damn you for being a pianist, Mendelssohn.) She pointed out that I drop a lot less than I would have dropped before, which is true. I appreciated the pep talk, but it didn’t lift my gloom entirely.

There’s that not-comforting-at-all adage that “What does not kill you makes you stronger,” and you know what? Maybe you don’t die, and maybe you do get life experience from all the crap, but when you have fibro it doesn’t actually make you stronger. It just keeps eroding you, bit by bit. On the other hand, it’s certainly character-forming.

I read a terrific spinning-related metaphor this morning from The Crafty Rabbit, though:

[F]ulling is a pretty good metaphor for life. You’re all ugly and uneven and imperfect and full of little bits of hay. Then you get beaten up–tossed from hot to cold, agitated with a plunger, smacked against a table. And then it turns out, after all that, that the abuse has smoothed you out, rendered you shiny and resilient. You’re still imperfect, yes, and you’re beautiful.

Fulling is the process whereby yarn or cloth gets cleaned and transformed or locked into its final form, for the lack of a better description. Some cloths felt when you do this (usually intentionally) and some yarn will, too, if you’re not wholly careful. Part of what you try to do with yarn, though, is shock it so that it plumps up and the scales on the fibre catch one another to make a stronger strand. You can’t turn a worsted-weight woollen-spun Coopworth yarn into laceweight silk by this method, but you can smooth out your Coopworth skein, plump it up, and make it stronger and nicer to touch.

It’s a good life metaphor, but this particular Coopworth skein (read: me) is tired of the fulling process and would just like to hang in the sun. Failing that, to stay in the hot bath with nice smelling soap, and have the cold immersion baths and furious agitation stop for a while.

Wednesday Log

We suffered another crushing disappointment today, the second in two weeks (and much worse than the first), so yeah, not so much with the productivity. I wish I had more energy to deal with the waves that life’s throwing at us.

In the meantime, today I:

– updated househunt spreadsheet
– researched more houses
– beta-read awesome spy story
– wove a bunch of blanket (didn’t measure, but it was at least a foot)
– scoured the oven (like scrubbing the bathtub, this knocked me out for a couple of hours)
– spun the rest of Jan’s fibre (I will ply it later this week)
– practised
– put aside the new freelance assignment till tomorrow, because I was in no way capable to wrapping my mind around it

The honeysuckle is just beginning to blossom, and the clematis is a day or so behind it. And the buds on my rosebushes are starting to open, too. The backyard is going to be spectacular for the boy’s birthday.

In an effort to cheer myself up I dragged the spinning wheel outside, changed into a halter top and my short jean skirt, and spun on the back porch in the sun while listening to my iPod. It was nice. Except now one of my arms and shoulders is sunburned, while the other is not.

I pulled my wooden cello bow out yesterday, the one with the cracked frog that I retired because I was afraid it was going to break. I’ve been using the fibreglass one that came with the 7/8 instead. I played with it all afternoon and really liked the feel of it; everything was easier. Then on a whim I pulled out the scale I bought to weigh fibre, and holy cow: my wooden one weighs 71 grams, while my fibreglass one weighs a whopping 83 grams. I used my fibreglass one today and it felt like I was sawing at the cello; I switched to the wooden one at the end and it danced. So I’m taking the wooden one out of retirement, and I intend to use it until the frog disintegrates.

Tuesday Log

Today my accomplishments included:

– business calls
– wove five inches of a new blanket
– did the programme notes
– translated the programme notes
– edited the recital programme
– practised for fifteen minutes (better than nothing)
– went out to buy the boy’s birthday present and some decorations for the party this weekend
– practised for another seventy-five minutes (trying to get the runs in the first movement of the Mendelssohn up to speed; working the pretty singing cello we’ve-got-the-theme moments of the second… in other words, going from first to seventh position, whee; plus my solo for the recital, and all my recital ensemble stuff)

Things that helped: Ceri has been sending me periodic e-mails reminding me to fret, which always makes me laugh. I acquired a Tolberone bar while out shopping for the boy’s gifts, and that also made the day happier.

Things that did not help: My first Quiznos experience. Yes, sandwich boy, I really do want a small ham and cheese on brown, with no spreads or sauces, and only lettuce. Asking me three times in disbelief doesn’t mean I have a low IQ or a communication problem, and your tone was, frankly, rather insulting. I’m the customer; I know what I want, and what I want is a sandwich not dripping with the excessive glop sandwich-makers pour over it. Just because I don’t want you to drown it in crap doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. Also, I didn’t want it toasted, and you didn’t ask; you just threw it in the oven. So you failed mightily in securing a return customer: instead you ensured that I will never walk into one of your franchises again.

On the schedule for tonight: Remembering to breathe.

Monday Log

Today my accomplishments included:

– receiving the approval for the assignment I handed in last Friday, and invoicing
– baking bread
– finishing Romancing Miss Bronte
– finishing River in the Sky
– half-hour nap
– spinning about two ounces of fibre Jan gave me to spin for her (which was a struggle because whoever dyed it ended up felting it slightly, and it doesn’t draft easily)
– updating the househunt spreadsheet
– handling correspondence

Frankly, after the exhausting weekend I had, I deliberately took it really easy today. And yet a couple of things that have happened (the spinning, some of the correspondence) has not been restful. I had to stop spinning because I seem to be clenching my jaw while I try to draft the felted stuff, which is not conducive to relaxing.

I am not looking forward to the meeting we’re hosting tonight, because I am not in people-mode, and HRH has to be elsewhere.

Weekend Roundup

Yet another insane weekend. Househunting is incredibly draining.

Friday afternoon the boy and I dropped HRH off to install gyproc while we ran errands, had ice cream, and visited our local LYS so I could spend my Mother’s Day gift certificate. I came home with a selection of some lovely fibre and a couple of little knitting tools (because you know I knit so much). Upon return I discovered that I’d mis-programmed the timer on the bread machine so the pizza dough was only just starting to mix, which meant that the dinner I’d planned was shot. I was about to defrost some hamburger meat and make spaghetti sauce when HRH suggested ordering pizza instead because we were pressed for time, and I gave in. As we were putting our shoes on to go to that night’s game HRH listened to the two message on the phone and we discovered that the game had been cancelled, which made both of us rather cranky. We ended up watching another three episodes of Chuck with Blade, who had come down stairs to be the Designated Responsible Adult On Site while we were out.

Saturday was a solid list of house viewings. Anyone who’s done this knows how exhausting it is. We got back around three-thirty and HRH did a whirlwind housecleaning while we waited for his parents to arrive, as they were babysitting the boy while we had an actual date night out. They arrived later than planned, so we pretty much ran out of the house. Dinner itself was lovely, delicious Italian eaten in the company of Ceri and Scott. The plan was to go see the new Prince of Persia film afterwards, but when we got to the theatre they were on the verge of selling out, so we all looked at one another and decided to go have dessert instead. We toyed with the idea of playing Rock Band, too, but we were pretty much all exhausted and went home.

Sunday morning the boy woke us up at five-fifteen for some reason. I left the house at 8:30 for a cello lesson at 9:00, followed by a two-hour group rehearsal at 10:00. I then raced home, picked up the boys, and we went househunting again. I ended up spending an awful lot of time outside in the cold rain, what with getting the boy to run around to keep him busy and working off steam and inspecting exteriors. It was longer than we expected, and on the way back into town we debated whether or not to attend the Preston-LeBlanc singalong that was about to begin. None of us were really in the mood: we were cold and wet, we weren’t dressed for it, I hadn’t had the time to buy the ingredients for the dish I had promised to bring let alone cook it, and we were all exhausted. But it was important that we at least make an appearance, empty-handed though it was, and I’m glad we did because a whole slew of other people cancelled. When we arrived I was wrapped in a warm pashmina and given hot tea to counter the cold chill I couldn’t shake, and after some nibblies we all felt much better, and we ended up staying two and a half hours instead of only half of one.

Both the boy and I had hot baths when we got home, and he fell asleep about five minutes after we tucked him in.