This is going to be a short one because Christmas happened, so there was lots of other stuff journaled about the boy to refer to if you want update-type stuff.
Poor kid, he was sick on Christmas Day, then sick with bad colds not once but twice in the next ten days. It made for a very tense holiday period because we couldn’t toss him out in the snow the way we wanted to. So there was a lot of book-reading and movie-watching instead. This is the month that will be remembered as the month the boy officially entered the world of Harry Potter. Sure, he’s kind of known about it before, but this month he watched the first two films (Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Express, and Harry Potter and the Flying Car. What, you know them by different names?) and really got into them. He can name all the houses and identify that he’s a Gryffindor (“That’s the house I live in!”). The basilisk in Chamber of Secrets makes him a bit anxious, but he’s pretty brave about it. Of course, being brave means watching the snake from behind a chair or casually from around the corner in th hall, but he does it. The other day he requested a lightning-shaped scar drawn on his forehead, which e wouldn’t allow to be washed off for three days. He then dashed around with a rolled-up piece of paper in the shape of a wand, pointing it at things and saying ‘magic words’ that resembled people’s names from the Potterverse. This exchange occurred in my office:
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SPARKY: [points his wand at the computer monitor] Dumble-a-dumbledore! [makes a static/lightning strike sound]
MAMA: Wow. What was that?
SPARKY: That was my magic wand! Look, all the letters are gone from there!
MAMA: Uh-oh!
SPARKY: Yeah!
MAMA: Well, can you put them back now?
SPARKY: [earnestly] No! They’re all in the wand! And I don’t know how to get them out!
(I see through you, small child. I know you’re trying to get me to stop working to play with you. )
We’re currently reading the Magic Tree House series of books, and he’s really getting into them. (I, on the other hand, am going crazy with all the sentence fragments, and am calling a halt to the month-long odyssey at the end of this story arc.) He’s getting better at reading, too. He can somewhat reliably read ‘cat,’ ‘dog,’ ‘in,’ ‘out,’ ‘wow,’ ‘mouse,’ ‘book,’ ‘train,’ ‘Canada’ (you had to know that one would be among the first words read), ‘home,’ and others I’m forgetting. I think we’ll try the Nate the Great series next. I tried reading him the first Time Warp Trio but his sense of humour isn’t quite there yet.
We are encountering the three-year-old push for independence and control of his environment. There’s a lot of “no” and “after I finish this” and “no, you do it,” which are fine in some contexts and just sheer frustration in most others. We know he’s being better-behaved at school than he is at home, and it’s somewhat frustrating to hear people say, “But he’s such a thoughtful, well-behaved, polite child!” Yes, we know that, and it would be nice if he demonstrated some of that at home these days. I know he’s working things out, and pushing to ascertain boundaries, and testing structures to make sure they’re consistent, but wow, it gets old fast.
He has joined the first-ever local pagan three-to-nine-year-old kids’ circle, and had a blast at the first introductory session with masks and the drum and snacks. I’m so excited about this, because he’ll hear about elements and deities and seasons and cultural celebration from someone who isn’t me, so he’s more likely to listen. (It’s just the nature of things, and I understand that.) And at school they’re doing a month-long unit on sound and music, so he comes home with all sorts of little tidbits of information there too.
The other day he picked up two bits of thread from his snowsuit and twiddled them together in his fingers. “I’m knitting!” he told HRH when he glanced in the rearview mirror. HRH told me this story when they got home and I couldn’t help but think of Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Cafe story about Sam and his hockey team knitting. He’s bright, he’s eager to learn, and I’m sure it won’t take long before he’s wrapping string around sticks and somehow managing a rough approximation of a knitted object.
Other Liam-themed posts this past month:
– Mama is cool because she has awesome movie music
– Liam rediscovers The Philosopher’s Stone
– poor Liam is sick on Christmas Day
Look what I found in my in-box this morning!
Things I Did In 2008 That I Have Never Done Before:
The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley
I haven’t journaled since Friday, so here’s a quick recap.
Then we picked up another gift that I hadn’t been able to get the day before, and we did groceries, and picked up the photographic proof that the boy saw Santa. (Good grief, look at how tall he is, especially when compared to
Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved Lego. I was going to search for something between the sizes of the Mega Bloks he’d been using when he was younger and the standard Lego size, but apparently he’s been working with standard Lego at school, so HRH brought up the huge bag of Lego that t! bequeathed to the boy and opened it up for him. (For those who were in the S:1999 game, there were parts of Moonbase Alpha still extant but not for long. I rescued the communicator before the boy wrecked it, although 
WALL*E has succeeded in completely and utterly eradicating any other film from the boy’s memory, and it’s all he watches now. He listens to the soundtrack while playing in his room and falling asleep, and now he wanders around singing the beginning of “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” as if he was our very own Michael Crawford. It’s adorable to hear him burble, “Listen, Barnaby!” and “we won’t come home until we’ve kissed a girl!” Book-wise, we’ve just finished The Wind in the Willows, and are about to start on Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series. We all love the snuggling in the big bed and reading a chapter every night.
One of the other exciting things that’s happened this month is of course the piles of snow we’ve already received. Even when there was only a scattering and the grass was still visible, he made the most of it. “I’ve never seen any child make so much out of so little,” his educator told HRH. “He was rolling in it that first day.” We’ve been adding a few seasonal decorations as the days go by. He made cut-out Christmas trees and painted a cone I’d made to look like a tree, and helped make paper chains, too. We introduced him to the Advent calendar, but he forgets most of the time (and so do we, really). Evidently we’re not doing a very good job differentiating between the season and the day itself, because Liam goes back and forth between flinging a hand out at all the snow and lights and saying, “But it *is* Christmas!” and saying very seriously in reply to something we say, “But it’s not Christmas *yet*.” Poor kid. It must be hard for him to figure out the difference because there are all sorts of Christmas-related activities going on like parties and concerts. The upstairs neighbours even hung the usual Yule stockings on the banister and he ‘s just angsting over what’s inside them. He’s at the age now where he knows he’s not supposed to open them, but that he’s still young enough that if he ‘forgot’ that he’s not supposed to open them he might get away with it. (In his mind, that is, not in our eyes.) I’d wrapped 
He’s figured out that knitting is something that I do and enjoy, and he wants to help. So he’ll come up to me and pick up the ball of yarn and say, “I’ll be your helper and hold this for you.” Which would be fine if he actually did hold it, but he doesn’t. He lifts it and pretends it’s a balloon, or drops it and then the cat chases it, or some other sort of mishap occurs. When it warmed up enough for me to wear my red coat and newly knitted scarf he looked at me while struggling to get his arms into his coat sleeves. “Why are you wearing that yarn around your neck?” he said. I thought it was interesting that he knows a knitted item is made of yarn, and that once it’s knitted up he stills identifies it as yarn, not whatever object it’s been knitted into.