An e-mail exchange during work this afternoon:
HRH: It’s snowing again. I’m starting to feel like a extra in the Narnia books.
Autumn: I said “Always winter and never Christmas” to Miranda just this morning!
HRH: How long was winter in the story?
Autumn: Over a hundred years.
HRH: Someone please kill the White Witch!
Autumn: Dude, you’re the one with the lion on his house crest. Do it already.
The Muppets continue to be omnipresent in our household. On Tuesday Liam took two wooden spoons from the drain board, chanted some gibberish, said “bork bork bork!” and tossed them in the air over his shoulder. I had to sit down to catch my breath after laughing. The Muppet Movie has become his movie of choice, which is fine because we enjoy it a lot. Watching it repeatedly over a short period of time has reminded me that it’s the source of quite a large number of in-jokes and catch phrases t! and I share.
Completely unrelated to this, he declared that he was Chef Liam the other day as he was helping me cook. I was browning beef cubes for stew when he took the spoon away from me and said importantly, “No, I stir, I Chef Liam.” So, keeping a watchful eye on him beside the stove, I let him finish browning the meat, then the onions and carrots. Then he helped me roll out pizza dough, spread the sauce on it by himself, then scattered some cheese, the pepperoni, mushroom, peppers, and then piles and piles of mozzarella on top! All I did was neaten things up and put in in the oven. Not long after that he came home and said, “I be a train driver.” Then a few days ago it was “I be a pirate.” And tonight, it was “I be a firefighter! In a helmet! And in a fire engine!” It’s kind of neat that he’s already experimenting with ideas for professions. Or maybe he just likes the idea of wearing the different hats.
New words that I can remember: ‘actually’ ( “Mama, what’s this in my soup?” “It’s a piece of potato, Liam.” “Actually, Mama, it’s a noodle.”), ‘because’, and, naturally, ‘Gryffindor’. In general the language use is becoming more complex by the day. Yikes. He can hop on one foot, his two-foot jumps have become real feet-off-the-floor long jumps, and one of his favourite things to do is spin around in place until he bumps into something or falls over.
The kid is crazy about the kitten. They play madly with one another, Liam dragging around a string and Gryff pounding after it, or Liam jigging a crumpled up drop card from a magazine tied to a shoelace and the kitten leaping around for it like Nureyev. If the cat’s not in the room, he waves the string around and says in a song-song way, “Gry-yff, I have your stri-ing,” and the cat comes shooting out from wherever he was in the house and launches himself at it while Liam shrieks with laughter. He has to go find the cat every night and pet him or blow him a kiss, depending on where the cat is, before he’ll go to bed. I am so glad that we seem to have succeeded in that particular objective of making sure cat and child get along and bond: the two of them have similar energy levels and keep one another busy.
New and (new favourite) books this month include: Mouse Soup by Arnold Lobel, and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig. They were second-hand, so I’m not concerned that we have to replace Mouse Soup already; the pages practically crumbled in my hands when we settled down to read it the first time. I love that any printed word fascinates him. “What does this say?” he’ll ask, pulling one of our novels towards him. Or he’ll assemble a random string of magnetic letters that look nice together on the fridge door and ask what it says. Last week he spelled something out for the first time, pointing at the letters. “D – O – G,” he spelled, then triumphantly said “Lightning!” and ran off as I looked at whatever the word was in bewilderment. Not only did it not have any of those letters, it wasn’t even remotely near the word ‘lightning’. Still, he spelled ‘dog’, even if he didn’t connect it to what he was seeing or saying. We’re working on ‘cat’ now. He used to recognise his name, ‘Mama’, and ‘Dada,’ but we haven’t written those out for him in a while so I have no idea if he still do it.
He has recently developed an obsession with being photographed. For example: “Mama, I have a big idea!” he said to me a couple of weeks ago. “You could go get the camera and take pictures of me!” “In your bath?” I said. “You’re offering me free blackmail material to use against you in your teens? I accept. You will regret this.” His caregiver’s webcam fascinates him. He has begun collecting photographs of people he knows, and keeps them in a tidy pile on a bookshelf in the living room. He sits and sorts through them like baseball cards or something. The day we got Gryff, I had to print a photo out for him to take to bed and sleep with.
In the car, he has, (completely independently of me) developed one of my quirks. I turned the car off the other day, having reached our destination, and he said, “No, Mama! We have to listen to the end of the song!” I hate it when people turn music off in the middle of a song. I like completion. If we can’t wait till the end of the piece, then the end of a musical phrase will do. I’m a sucker for musical resolution. Evidently, so is he. Or maybe he just likes hearing the end of his favourite songs.
He helps wash the dishes, dragging a chair over and swishing them around in the water. He has also agreed to help feed Gryff, and he carries the bowl of food oh so carefully into the next room. He is much less careful with his bowls of Cheerios. If he asks to help while I’m getting dinner ready I’ll get him to set the table, too.
He had his first lollipop this month. It was orange. The waitress brought it to him when she brought our bill the day he and I had lunch out together. I hadn’t intended to give it to him but he grabbed it and so I said he could hold it while I settled the bill. Then it naturally found its way into his mouth, like most things do, and he chewed through the plastic. The first I heard of it was when he said, “Mmm, Mama, this very good!” from behind me when I was putting on my coat. “Oh, candy!” he exclaimed at the caregiver’s the other day when he pulled a box of mints out of my bag. “I like candy!” And how did you figure that out? I wanted to ask, because he’s had maybe three or four pieces in his entire life. But I suppose we’re genetically programmed to like sugar and sweet things, because it’s a form of quick energy. He had his first mint that day, and kept taking it out of his mouth to lick it like the lollipop. He couldn’t understand why it was getting smaller and why it finally vanished. He doesn’t yet understand why his soap is smaller every week, either. I recently modified a test recipe for granola bars and he won’t stop eating them. I should be thankful, I suppose, but instead I’m just mildly irritated that he and HRH eat most of the pan before I can save some for my breakfasts.
He has finally reached the age where he can tell us stories in bed. “Tell me a story about Mack! And Bun-Bun! And they were flying!” he’ll say. “Oh yes?” I murmur. “And then what happens?” “And then Bun-Bun falls down! And Mack falls down! And Mama finds them!” “And then what happens?” And then Liam goes on to tell me the whole story is what happens, although he hasn’t yet figured out that’s what he’s doing. He still thinks he’s telling me the story to tell him. Except I never do; at the end I say, “Wow, that was a great story, Liam,” and he says, “Yeah!” with enthusiasm, as if I’ve just finished telling it to him. The other day I came to an interesting realization: my son asks for bedtime fanfic. “Tell me a story about Thomas/Frog and Toad/Lightning/ Buzz Lightyear,” he will suggest. And even worse, it’s often Mary-Sue fanfic, where he is one of the main characters and the best friend of everyone. It’s all I can do not to laugh now that I’ve made the connection and he asks me for a story along these lines. The other night I was tired of making fanfic up for him and had zero imagination after a long draining day, so I started telling him the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. He listened in absolute silence all the way to the end, when he turned his head on the pillow to face me and said with a huge smile, “That was a really good story, Mama!” Of course it is, kid; it’s stood the test of time and countless refinements over the years.
Last week he played a game at the caregiver’s where he trotted around the living room, down the hall, around the spare room, then back through the hall to the living room. She asked him what he was doing, and he said, “I’m playing a game!” “What game?” she asked. “The BLUE game!” he said with delight and kept on going. We never found out exactly what the blue game was or what the rules were. It doesn’t really matter. He knew what it was, and that’s what counts.
Other Liam-related posts this past month:
– Liam takes Mama to the doctor, Mama takes Liam to the bank and the bookstore and lunch
– I can have a piano?
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson
A Wizard Alone by Diane Duane
Wizard’s Dilemma by Diane Duane
The Chains That You Refuse by Elizabeth Bear
Living Well With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia by Mary J Shomon
Fibromyalgia for Dummies (2nd ed.) by Roland Staud and Christine Adamec
The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon
White Night by Jim Butcher
Marie, Dancing by Caroline Meyer
How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen (reread)
Striding Folly by Dorothy L Sayers
A Wizard Abroad by Diane Duane
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald: It’s unfortunate that this is the book I read last of all this month, all in one sitting and to help me relax. It ended very unhappily. It wasn’t a bad book, or a bad read; I just timed the reading of it very badly. If I’d been in a different headspace I would have been very impressed by how the book set the protagonist up to fail, and the reader, conditioned by society’s love of stories about people who seem doomed to failure who triumph anyhow, expects the protagonist to prevail.. and, true to the reality of the plot, she doesn’t.
Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson: My imagination works perfectly well, and so I didn’t need to know what happened to Anne before she was adopted by Matthew and Marilla. But I was curious to see how Budge Wilson imagined it, so I picked it up. Lovely design of the book itself. The story, well, it was all right. Nothing spectacular. An interesting snapshot of what life was really like at the time for the region, more than anything else. And when a book is about Anne, you expect her to be the most interesting character, but she wasn’t. I did enjoy the fully imagined parts about Anne’s parents, and watching Budge explore and develop the characters Anne refers to only once or twice in the Montgomery books. A mildly interesting experiment, nothing more. Certainly not crucial for Anne fans.
Marie, Dancing by Caroline Meyer: Yawn. I wish I’d remembered that Cymry read this one; I ran into her single-sentence review after I’d read it and thought, yes, that’s pretty much it: I wanted a book about dancing, and I didn’t get it.
A Wizard Alone etc. by Diane Duane: These are just excellent, solid YA books that walk the line dividing fantasy and science fiction. I have one more to read, and I’m saving it.
The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon: I;ve been off Gabaldon since I read Drums of Autumn; I just wasn’t as interested in reading about settlers’ lives in North Carolina. Except I was in the mood for some historical fiction the other week and I picked up the newest one on the Outlander series, seeing only the four I already owned on the bookstore shelf. When I got home I realized they’d been out of stock on The Fiery Cross, which I also hadn’t read, so I picked it up. I read it in about three days and deliberately gave myself a couple of weeks off before starting the next volume. Evidently I really needed those eleven years away from the characters to really enjoy them again.
Liam’s handle on language has taken yet another leap. I was sitting next to the boy while we watched a DVD the other week and realized that I was having a full-blown conversation with my son about the Muppets, complete with analysis of humour and use of similes, and we were both taking it for granted. I am just blown away by how communication evolves over the first three years.
The Muppets are very big in our house these days. He loves the opening sequence, dancing and singing along here and there, always joining in for the final line, raising his hands up in the air and saying “SHOOOOOW!” with all the Muppets on-screen. His favourite skit is Pigs In Space, which he calls “Piggies in the Spaceship”. He loves Robin and Miss Piggy, and is quite fond of Kermit. He impressed me the other night when the news anchor Muppet came on and started talking. Liam narrowed his eyes at the screen and said, “That Kermit.” I tried to explain that the person providing the newscaster’s voice was the same person who did Kermit’s voice, but it went right over his head or out into left field or something, and understandably so: Muppets are Muppets. When kids talk to them in person, they talk to the Muppet, not the person standing there holding it. Of course the puppets talk on their own; a Muppeteer is an alien concept. So I rationalized it by saying that the news anchor was Kermit in disguise. Liam looked at me, opened his mouth in a silent “Ah!” as if he had been initiated into a deep adult secret, and was satisfied.
One of the bonus features on the second season DVD set is the Weezer video of “Keep Fishing” that features some of the Muppet cast. I’d heard about the video when it was originally released in 2002 but haven’t seen it until now. Liam stood with his mouth open, his eyes riveted to the screen as the band moved from backstage at the Muppet theatre to play on the stage itself. He extended his hand in my direction, not moving his eyes from the band playing with the Muppets on-screen. “I need my cello,” he said. I got the viola out for him, and as he wouldn’t take his eyes off the action on the television we eased him into a sitting position, set it up in his lap, leaned it against his shoulder, and put the bow in his right hand. He played his cello along with the band for the rest of the video. It was terrific to see.
Lately he has really gotten into playing Hide and Seek. The only problem is that he gets so excited when he hides that when whoever is seeking him narrates their search, he responds to it. “Are you in the… bedroom?” I will say, and “Noooo!” he will exclaim from the bathroom. HRH was trying to straighten out the problem the other night and had a great time chuckling at the boy when they hid in the bathroom together, Liam bouncing up and down, hands over his mouth to keep himself quiet, and eyes wide, nearly bursting with excitement as I searched. His play has developed into a fascinating display of imagination and storytelling. Trains meet and converse and part, cars encounter difficulties and challenges and work through them. Sometimes he provides all the voices, and other times he narrates what is happening to himself or to other toys. And he’s engaging in very obvious pretending now. “Maggie is the white Totoro!” he will say. “Let’s follow her! Oh no, we can’t see her! Now she under the house!” (Poor Maggie gets cast as a wide variety of things, some of them inanimate, and is really doing a heroic job of keeping up with the exuberance of a two and a half year old who is now coordinated enough to pick her up and lug her around.) One of his current special possessions is a blue velveteen ring box that I found while clearing out a closet. “I can have this?” he said. Later I found it under the chesterfield and was going to throw it out when he grabbed it from me and said, “No, you can’t! That my game!” The implication was clear: If you won’t let me play with your Nintendo DS, I’ll make my own game, thank you very much. So we coloured dots with markers inside for buttons, and he sits on the sofa and presses them, looking at the upper ‘screen’. Over the past month it has also evolved to be his ‘computer’. It sits on his chest of drawers.
His singing of the alphabet song has become very clear, and is evidently making an impact. When he stands at the fridge door and plays with the magnetic letters he moves the A up then says, “And here the letter B!” He knows the B comes after the A. The only problem is he grabs any letter that has a vaguely similar structure such as an E, or a K, or an R. There are also tremendous potty advances being made which I haven’t been talking about for fear of jinxing things. Many are the stickers applied to weekly charts, many are the high fives. And he counted to twenty-one today, clearly and correctly, which is the highest I’ve ever heard him count.
His current favourite books are the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. I bought Frog and Toad All Year last week because I saw it in the little local book store and remembered loving it as a child. I was also getting tired of reading the same books over and over at bedtime. It enchanted Liam, who somehow suddenly knew every chapter title and could ask for them out of sequence, so I picked up two more this weekend on our Saturday runabout and gave him one that night, and the other is aside for a rainy day.
As a treat I bought blackberries at the beginning of February, intending to use them in an Imbolc ritual. He ate every single one of them over the course of the day. He was enjoying them so much that I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that he couldn’t have any more, especially when he asked for them so nicely. I figure the obvious joy he felt in eating them was a suitable offering to Brid instead. ‘Lola bars’ are also high on his list of yummy food, and I introduced sunflower seeds to him two days ago as well. He asked me today if they would grow if he planted them, “my seeds, my seeds that I put in my mouth?”
Liam can be such a funny little thing. When HRH wore an old paint-spotted shirt last weekend he got very upset: “Dada, it dirty. We clean it? We clean it for you?” With all the winter storms we’ve been having there has been major snow removal going on (although not anywhere near the frequency at which it ought to be happening), and he’s glued to the front window when the giant snowblowers and dump trucks inch down the street. He renamed his toy excavator ‘the snowblower’ and pushes it around the floor behind the matching dump truck, the scoop angled up over the dump truck like the snowblower does. He watched our next-door neighbour, who uses his big red pick-up truck for snow removal, clear our immediate neighbour’s driveway one day. “See how Pierre uses his truck to plough the snow?” HRH said. “Yes,” said Liam, watching the red truck manoeuvre in and out of the driveway. Then: “I have a truck?” “When you’re older,” said HRH, somehow keeping a straight face.
Something HRH and I started ages ago was the family hug, where Liam would nestle with one parent and the other parent would hug both. Two weeks ago HRH was saying goodnight as Liam and I were settling down for a bedtime story when Liam bounced up and said, “Family hug!” Tenderly he put one arm around my neck and the other arm around HRH’s, and we put our arms around one another and him as well, and our hearts nearly burst. We’re doing okay with this kid. He’s a good one. And we can’t wait to see how he discovers other wonderful things in the coming months and years.
I just received a message from my editor at Provenance Press. She told me that The Way of the Green Witch is selling steadily (hurrah!) and that they’re reissuing it with a new cover!
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am about this. Hearing that a book is selling steadily is always good news, but to hear that the cover is being redone made my week. I am less than fond of the Way of the Green Witch cover; I was disappointed with it when they showed me the final version and suggested several other possibilities, including some of the very different original cover they proposed for it, but without success. The new cover is being finalised right now, and as soon as I have a picture of it I’ll post it. I’m so excited!
My editor is also pushing for a reissue of Solitary Wicca for Life with a new cover. Updates as events warrant!
Tarot Cafe vol. 1 by Sang-Sun Park
Violin Dreams by Arnold Steinhardt
Childe Morgan by Katherine Kurtz
Dark Moon Defender by Sharon Shinn
Virgin Earth by Philippa Gregory
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Earthly Joys by Philippa Gregory
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
The Druidry Handbook by John Michael Greer
Dust by Elizabeth Bear
Daughter of Venice by Donna Jo Napoli
Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature by Linda Lear
You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop by John Scalzi
The Cipher by Diana Pharaoh Francis
Notes for Posterity:
Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature by Linda Lear: I wax rhapsodic over this book! Lovely! Even the two chapters on mycology, which gave me more general knowledge and detail about fungus than I ever wanted to know! Potter is one of my heroes, so this three-inch-thick hardcover was such a joy to read. An excellent, well-balanced biography.
Dust by Elizabeth Bear: I enjoyed this so darn much. I’m mildly curious as to why I enjoyed it more than Bear’s Promethean Age books, for as a general rule I prefer reading stories with Elizabethan poets, faerie, and ceremonial magic in them to space opera/generation ship sagas. The characters were just so well-crafted, though, and I liked how a lot of the story was implied but not actually told, leaving the reader to be a really active participant in constructing the narrative. Also, it features really cool concepts of deity and of how lore gets encoded in day to day life over millennia within a closed system. And somehow, while Bear implies a lot, she still manages to convey a remarkably rich atmosphere. I’m in awe of how Bear can leap from genre to genre and write so well in all of them.
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor: Another book where I chose a bad place to stop, early on in the book. When I eventually picked it up and read past that point, it was excellent. I should buy the second one.
Violin Dreams by Arnold Steinhardt: I read this in a hour and a half, and was left feeling as if there was three-quarters of the book missing. Now, I understand that the book is deliberately impressionist in that it’s a narrative that traces the different instruments Steinhardt has owned and one particular piece of music he has a special relationship with, but there was just enough context given that I felt there were gaping autobiographical lacunae. There was a lot of time devoted to covering certain events, and others glossed over or left out and yet still referred to later.
Childe Morgan by Katherine Kurtz: Thanks to my fibro-fog I bought this thinking it was a stand-alone or first in a trilogy, then read it and realized that it was a second volume in a trilogy. And what is referred to as having happened in the first volume was vaguely recognizable, but I can’t find the book on my shelves, and now I don’t know if I actually read it at some point or if my brain is obligingly filling in the gaps with trowelfuls of imagination. (Checking my Past Read list, I see that I did in fact read it exactly two years ago, so why I can’t find the book is a mystery.)
Tarot Cafe by Sang-Sun Park: This was a ‘hey, whatever’ buy through a remainder shop, purchased because buying three books there was equivalent to buying one new, and I’d read a decent review of it somewhere. If I was into emo stories told with Bambi-eyed characters (all of them — every single one) I would have enjoyed it a lot more. As it was I was left wishing the whole thing was a lot grittier and less pretty. The concept is great — gifted Goth tarot reader reads the stories of her clients, who are all otherwordly in some way — but the prettiness is cloying. I’d like to see what Neil Gaiman would do with the concept.
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr: A solid YA retelling of the Winter/Summer kings/queens in faerie theme. Not derivative, thank goodness, and has some very well-drawn characters whose actions are believable. I’ll look for the second one when it’s released.
Today’s excitement: having my car key snap off in the trunk lock as I prepared to load the car with a shopping trip’s worth of stuff.
Yes! So exciting! Liam and I called friends who used to have an extra copy of our car key, but they were not home. We called HRH to apprise him of the necessity of picking the car up on his way home from work, and then my phone died a messy death (it can’t hold a charge worth beans, but I am not complaining because it was second-hand, inexpensive, and has served me well for almost a whole year). Then we liberated the emergency umbrella stroller that languishes in the back of the car, covered the major purchases with the car blanket, made sure the immediate necessities and little things were in pockets or bags, locked up the car, and took the bus home.
Naturally, the freezing rain began halfway across the parking lot.
Luckily, Liam thought the whole thing a grand adventure, partially fuelled by my animated “Want to do something really cool? Let’s take the bus home!” pitch. And then we stopped in at a gas station on our fifteen-minute trek to a bus stop to buy a granola bar as a treat, and he was thrilled about that too. (It was an excuse to break the five dollar bill in my wallet to have sufficient change for the bus). He had been very well-behaved during our department store experience, walking next to me and holding my hand; I was very impressed. He’s on the verge of being too big for the seats in shopping carts, so learning how to walk while we shop is a good thing. His good mood made things easier to handle. So did the not-crowded bus. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a bus that empty on that route.
There is irony involved in all this, too. We went out to buy a new microwave, as the one we have been using by the grace of Tal for the past two years mysteriously ceased functioning last night. (Don’t worry, Tal, if/when you require a microwave oven again, we will replace it for you.) I was punching in a time when the lights went out and that was that — no crackles or sparks or warnings of slow death. I am mystified. It is currently in the garage while it thinks about the error of its ways (let’s call it a time out for appliances). We don’t use the microwave for anything other than reheating tea, warming up milk or leftovers, or defrosting meat that’s being stubborn, so the one we got is tiny and only 700 watts. And the irony of having gone out to buy the new microwave is that we cannot use it, as it’s sitting covered by the blanket in the back of the locked car of a parking lot at the other end of town. I discovered this when I went to warm up Liam’s pasta and veggies for lunch.
I also need a new car key, and HRH will need to get the snapped-cleanly-level-with-the-lock key out. Issues for tomorrow.
But the day is not a wreck (not that it was in any danger of being one, it wasn’t as huge a disaster as it could have been… I could have accidentally locked the passenger side car doors after buckling Liam in and then snapped the key), because the copy of the Druid Plant Oracle that I ordered from the UK arrived while Liam was eating lunch. It will not be available in North America until August. I win.
Also, when Liam watches the opening credits to the Muppet Show, he sings the final “SHOOOOOOOOW!” along with the cast, hilariously off-key.
That is all.