Category Archives: The Boy

Weekend Roundup

Busy end to a busy week. Gah.

The kindergarten orientation went brilliantly on Friday; when the boy’s name was called he hopped up and trotted out of the library to get his nametag and wait in line without even looking back. There is another boy in his class with his full name, and one with his nickname, so things should be very interesting. (There are also two Scotts, a fact the boy finds very interesting. He thinks it’s fun that someone else shares his name(s), too). If the stars align he shall have one of his old preschool educators as his teacher, although the second kindergarten teacher is very nice as well.

We enjoyed our own school tour, and our orientation sessions about school life and rules and such. Looks like HRH may join the parent committee that handles things like planning events and upkeep and such things, and I will likely volunteer at the library one day a week. Every single teacher and administrator we met was cheerful and open, and the school had a wonderful vibe to it. We’ve made the right choice. We eventually met the boy in a kindergarten room where he showed us all sorts of things with great excitement, like building toys in bins and caterpillars in little containers that the current kindergarten kids were studying.

After that we walked the boy back to preschool and I went to run errands and set up in a coffee shop to handle the interview questions that I’d been poking at for a couple of weeks, and HRH went back to work. He picked me up a couple of hours later and we went back to preschool for the boy’s play, which was hilarious. The educators and kids did a fabulous job on the sets, the costumes (that parents helped with those), and their lines. The kids were all animals on a farm, and the boy was the billy goat. Then we all had a feast of classic summer backyard picnic foods, and I wish we could have stayed longer.

My cello lesson went really well, something that surprised me. Apparently the key is to be exhausted, because then you don’t overthink or tense up.

Saturday morning we went out and got the boy new sandals (these are size 11, his old ones from last year were size 7, what are we feeding him?) and shorts, picked up groceries, and hit the library for some books on trains — no, robots — no, spaceships! — and I collected the pile of reserves i had waiting for me. That afternoon I had a group cello rehearsal where everyone was finally in the same place and we played through pieces we’d never really rehearsed before. I wasn’t as on as I’d been the night before.

Going to see the weavers at the cultural rendez-vous in Pointe-Claire over the weekend did indeed get dropped, as did the boy’s monthly pagan playgroup meeting on Sunday morning because we were scheduled to go to another series of house viewings. The last one we saw was hard to pull ourselves away from: it was all polished glowing wood inside, just like an old cottage or farmhouse, with an exquisite new kitchen and bathroom, with two bedrooms upstairs under a peaked roof that had painted wooden floors, one of which could easily be split into two for two smaller bedrooms. But it just wasn’t big enough; we really need a basement and somewhere for my office, and this house had neither. Well, it had a basement, but I felt like I had to duck, and HRH could barely fit through the door to the very awkward stairs down. It would have been storage and nothing else. In fact, the last time HRH went down he cracked his head really badly. Later he joked that it was the house slapping him and saying, “I’m all wrong for you!” It’s sad when you really love a house but can’t do anything about it because you’d need to severely alter it just to live there.

When we got home I had to scurry off yet again for a cello rehearsal, this one a private accompaniment rehearsal. And while my first go was rocky in the intonation area, I adjusted my endpin, played through it twice more, and declared myself rather happy with things, somewhat to my and my teacher’s surprise. I think playing this piece with the piano accompaniment is easier, somehow; it gives me something on which to to hang the cello line.

HRH and I started watching the first season of Chuck this weekend, which we are enjoying immensely. I had no idea HRH had borrowed it, but I am hoping we can borrow more.

Monday I finished polishing the interview as I planned, even though I discovered to my chagrin that it had been due on the Friday, not the Monday as I’d plugged into my calendar and schedule. The interviewer sent a polite note asking if I wanted to reschedule as I was finishing up, and I felt like an idiot for my error. But It got done, and handed in, and I received another request for an interview that day for a different source, due in three weeks.

And finally, Monday late afternoon and evening I finished warping the loom that has been languishing in various in-between stages for the past few weeks. Hurrah!

Weekend Roundup

It was a lovely weekend. It felt like it went on forever, such a nice change from wondering where the weekend went. The weather was spectacular, which helped a lot. Our windows were open all the time, and the scent of the lilacs from over the back fence is just heavenly. I’m enjoying it, even though I know it’s all two weeks early. Normally we’d be gardening in weather like this, but as we now have our official pre-approved mortgage and are looking for a house on the south shore this summer (yay!), we’re not planting annuals or doing the vegetable garden this year. The extent of our planting was scattering wildflower seed in the front and side gardens, and trimming the deadheads off the tulips.

First thing Saturday morning HRH and I went to get our passport photos taken. And wow, in this day and age of digital cameras, it’s five minutes and done. They even showed us the digital pictures and asked if they were okay. Then we went to the library for our new library cards, and the boy got his photo taken because it’s been two years since the last one, which is almost half a lifetime ago for him. (I got to keep mine, because I don’t change as rapidly as he does.) It’s been about six weeks since I’ve managed to get to the library, so I paid my lingering fine and grabbed a couple of new releases.

Saturday morning I had one of those cello lessons where I almost reached the point of tears because I couldn’t play an open D followed by an open A. Yes, you read that right. I hate the opening bar to pretty much any solo piece, and the Lully gavotte is no different. I’m too forceful, I’m lifting the bow, I’m not articulating properly, where’s the contact between bow and string at the tip of the bow… I could go on. Two stupidly easy notes, open strings. And yet I can’t do it properly.

While I was celloing HRH took the boy to the toy store so he could buy a Playmobil airplane with the sixty (!) dollars he’d saved up in his piggy bank. They picked me up from my lesson and we stopped over at Ceri and Scott’s place so they could sign our passport applications as guarantors and references. Back home we had a light lunch and then everyone kind of rested, the boy on purpose and HRH and I somewhat unintentionally. I started measuring the warp for a new project on my warping board and managed to completely overestimate the finished length, so I measured two feet more of warp than I needed, which meant I ran out of yarn very quickly. In self-defence I must point out that this is the first time I’ve used a warping board for a full-length piece, and zig-zagging back and forth in a small area makes a length look much shorter than it is when you stretch it out. I redid my calculations and saw that I’d been overly generous with my calculation of loom waste, but even if I’d been measuring the two-feet-shorter version I’d have been short of yarn. I would have to buy another skein of it, which was mildly annoying because I was doing this to use up this particular yarn. Other really frustrating things happened too, like the skein tangling terribly while I wound it into two centre-pull balls, and then the centre-pull balls tangling terribly. (This last is particularly infuriating because centre-pull balls are supposed to eliminate tangling.) Coven was cancelled that night, so I had a hot bath and went to bed.

Sunday morning we were all up stupidly early, so the boy and I headed out to buy that other skein of yarn. When we got home the boy and HRH mowed the back lawn, and then we all went out to do our weekly grocery order. After lunch we were ambushed by naps, and when we got up we went out for a bike ride! The boy biked to the local schoolyard and HRH and I walked our bikes behind him, and he practised cycling on a flat surface. Next trip the training wheels come off, because he hasn’t quite figured out that he needs to go fast enough so that he won’t fall over without them. But as this is the second time he’s used his two-wheeler (rain and the busy have prevented us in the past month) he’s doing pretty well, and is understanding steering and braking and putting a foot down on the ground when he stops. There was a bit of not wanting to try because it was hard/scary/required attention, but we worked through that. And he loved that we had our bikes out with him, too.

I finished measuring the warp for the new project, and I’ll wind and sley it today so the loom will be ready for weaving when I feel like it later this week. Today is also slated for writing and transcribing for my own work, making bread, and practising those two damn notes on the cello.

Fifty-Nine Months Old!

One month till the boy turns five. Thirty-one days.

We have to remember to round his age up when people ask how old his is, now. And he’s measuring actions according to his age. He will sometimes politely refuse to try a new food. “No, Mama,” he’ll say, “that’s food for a five-year-old. I’m only four. But when I’m five I’ll like it.” He’ll do the same thing with toys or activities; he’s saving some of them for when he turns five. Mind you, the reverse is also operative: some things he tells me are okay for four-year-olds, but when he’s five he’ll stop.

One of the funniest things about this past month was his discovery of baked potatoes. That sounds odd, but it’s so much fun to see him get excited when I tell him that we’re having baked potatoes with dinner. He saw an illustration of one in a picture book and asked what it was. HRH explained it to him, and he said they sounded delicious. So I baked potatoes the next night to go with dinner, sliced it open, put a curl of butter on top, and he was thrilled. He asks for them all the time, now. It’s like he’s discovered the most exciting food ever. Baked potatoes. Really. I mean, there are other cool things associated with dinner, such as how he clears the table and puts the dishes in the dishwasher and such, and usually asks to be excused (every time he got up from the picnic at Tristan’s naming ceremony, for example, he asked to be excused, which amused me; he must be the only little boy in existence who asks to be excused from a picnic blanket, not once, but three times), but the baked potato thing is just so wacky.

He is fearless and so very confident in his inability to get hurt. He throws himself from a standing position off the top of the slide, and swings from the top bar of the swingset. He doesn’t watch where he’s going when he runs, hurls himself enthusiastically around corners, slips, bounces off walls. We are mostly sanguine about this now. We are less sanguine about his ability to selectively hear warnings and instructions, and listening actively is something we’re working on. So is following instruction immediately instead of saying “I’m just going to do this one thing first.”

His preschool is working on a play. He came home with a little script, very excited. They’re basing it on Leslie McGuire’s picture book This Farm is a Mess. The kids are all the different animals, and the educators are the narrator, the farmer, and the mama chicken (the baby chicks are being played by the three babies of the daycare). The boy has been cast as the goat, and said he needed a costume. So I, with my years of experience creating costumes out of nothing, pulled out a pair of black socks with holes in them, and cut off the toes. “What are you doing?” he asked. I slid them over his forearms and said, “These are your hooves and legs,” and I thought he was going to pop from excitement. I then pulled out an old grey t-shirt and cut out a tail and two floppy ears, tipping each with black marker. I sewed the ears to a black headband, put a big safety pin through the tail, gave him one of his grey shirts to wear, and voila, we had one little black and grey kid goat. He has been practising his “meh-eh-eh-eh” sound, and we sit down every day or so and go over his lines. The day he brought home the script he arranged HRH and I, and said, “We will do my play. Dada, you can be the farmer, and Mama, you can be the narrator; that means the person who tells the story,” he explained, patting my hand. I just about exploded with that indescribable feeling of pride mixed with joy and triumph. My son knows what a narrator is. I, of course, desperately want to be there to see this play be performed, but parents are almost certainly going to distract them (the average age here is two or three years, after all), so I think they’re planning on doing it in front of a video camera to make a movie instead, which we will all get on DVD. If they do this, I am praying that they do credits, because that will absolutely blow the boy’s mind.

Perhaps most poignant of all this month, however, was the morning that he asked for us to practise our cellos together before he went to school, and he played lovely open double stops while I played Twinkle over them. And we discovered that his own little cello, which is in truth a full-size viola, is now too small for him; he has undeniably outgrown it. If he’s going to play (and we mean seriously, not messing around with it as he’s been doing) then he’s going to need an actual 1/8 or 1/4 size cello, rented from the luthier. My teacher has a new student who is three years old, the younger sister of a seven or eight-year-old student, and so if he decides that this is something he really does want to pursue, then he has a classmate. We’ll talk about it seriously over the summer. I’ve already proposed the Suzuki week-long junior music daycamp for six-year-olds and under to him, and he’s responded enthusiastically to the idea, so we shall see. The last time he asked for music lessons I told him that if he really wanted to he could start once he was established in kindergarten, and that’s rapidly drawing nigh. The icon image is of a photo taken when he was two months shy of two years old. He is, to say the least, much larger than that now…

Weekend Roundup, Mother’s Day Edition

At my cello lesson on Saturday morning I shared my concerns about the Bach Gavotte with my teacher. A month working on it alone did me no favours. I recorded it a day or so before the lesson and hated what I heard. It just wasn’t smooth enough at this point in the game. And with so much work to do for orchestra and the ensemble recital pieces… well, I said I thought the Lully would be a better choice, and she fully supported me. So we proceeded to work on different bits of it, including a full ten minutes just playing the first two notes trying to get the articulation just right. She switched me to something else just in time before I lost it.

I know I can play the Bach at the Christmas recital. But it was my goal for this recital, and we mangled the timing. I feel better about the decision, but I’m still really disappointed.

I came home through the rain, picked up the boy, and we went to get my new reeds for the rigid heddle loom. The lady was wonderful. She reps Ashford, Majacraft, and Schacht out of her home, so if I need pretty much anything in the way of spinning or weaving equipment from any of the major companies (other than Kromski, who of course makes the next wheel I want, sigh) I’m covered by her and my LYS. I was there for about twenty minutes talking to her about things, and admiring the cherrywood Baby Wolf loom set up in the corner of her living room, warped for tea towels. She’s pretty much got me convinced to do the guild thing, even if I can’t make regular meetings. It’s amazing how meeting one kind, open person can change my mind. She told us about the upcoming cultural rendez-vous at the end of the month at Stewart Hall, one of the two cultural demonstrations/festivals they host per year, so I’ll go over with the boys and check it out. The guild is going to have things set up for demonstrations and an open house, and she said she’d show me their looms and projects.

Then we stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house, and the boy played with their new Prince of Persia Lego set while Ceri scrutinized the baby blanket and told me that it was wonderful and perfectly acceptable for gifting, which made me very happy. She also sent me away with a bottle of red wine, bless her. The boy and I shared soup and a sandwich at Tim Hortons, and then went to Pointe-Claire village to pick up chocolates for the various mums and mum-figures. After that we went to the little toy store after lunch so he could buy something with his twenty dollars, and he chose a Playmobil policeman on a motorcycle. He had enough money left over for a single figure, so he walked up and down the aisles looking for something, and then finally stopped, frustrated. “What are you looking for?” I said. “Mama, I need a girl police to go with this,” he said. The only policewoman figure they had was in a two-pack with a robber, so I paid the extra so he could have his “girl police.” Also, bonus bad guy for them to apprehend!

We got back home mid-afternoon and HRH went off in the car to run his errands, and the boy has a rest. He’s fighting a cold, and needed it despite the late naptime. I woke him up an hour later, and made dinner for him. While he napped I started weaving on the warp I’d done on the rigid heddle loom earlier in the week; I had new reeds to experiment with, after all, and so I needed to use up what I had on the loom! I’d played with combining warp threads of two different grists and an empty slot, and for weft I used the coloured Lion Homespun yarn I’d first tested the loom with in April. It wove up brilliantly, the warp threads making a lovely variation in texture, and the Homespun behaved perfectly as weft. I finished weaving it that night, but didn’t cut it off the loom till Sunday morning. (I think it’s a table runner, and I think it’s a wedding present for someone. I’m going to have to start making two of everything, because I want to keep this, too!)

We received or tax refunds in the mail on Thursday (yay!), so on Saturday night after the boy went to bed we treated ourselves to a sushi dinner while curled up in front of the TV, watching episodes of Castle that Karine had taped for us. (Yes, HRH found an operational VCR languishing in a storeroom at work, so he liberated it; now we can watch tapes again!)

Sunday morning we woke up to snow. I was pretty wiped, so HRH did the groceries. Before he left I got my Mother’s Day presents. The boy had made a card and “nests” at school, a stupidly delicious chocolate-peanut butter-Rice Krispie thing pushed into tiny foil tart shells, with peanut M&M “eggs” in the nests, and HRH gave me a card and a gift certificate to Ariadne Knits. The boy had an early lunch and a rest, and while he was napping our friend John came by and dropped off a big storage bucket of Lego, including some truly awesome specialised pieces, a robot, and a tonne of figures and horses. The boy was thrilled when he got up (which he did moments after John left, as if he has some kind of new-Lego radar). We let him dig gleefully through it for about half an hour, then we went over to HRH’s parents’ house. I stayed for half an hour and then had to leave for our monthly group cello lesson, which went relatively well for me up till the last ten minutes. I hate it when that happens, because those final minutes colour the whole thing. I went back to the south shore to rejoin the family, and we had a lovely Mother’s Day dinner, with a really nice red wine and a lovely cake for dessert, before coming home and collapsing in bed.

Dear Diary: Today Our Son Built His First Battlemech

When I dragged myself out of bed today, I found HRH and the boy in the living room working with Lego, as usual. There was a robot on the table.

“Hey, nice robot,” I said.

“Yeah!” the boy said, excited, and proceeded to show me all the features, including a tiny helmeted Lego man sitting inside the robot’s head in front of a viewscreen. I looked at HRH, who looked back at me.

“I had nothing to do with this,” he said. “It was, ‘Hey, Dada, I want to make a robot. With guns. And a driver.’ So I said okay, and we designed it together. Dear Diary: Today my son built his first battlemech.”

The boy started telling me a story about it, and I said, “Wait wait wait: You’re telling me that this robot hangs from the bottom of a plane, from a rack? And the driver climbs down to sit in it? And then it’s released from the rack and falls to the earth to do what it needs to do?”

“Yes!” the boy said.

HRH and I exchanged a glance again, one of those wide-eyed ‘no I don’t know where he came up with all of this’ looks that we can’t help but trade now and again. Because, really, he’s had no exposure to battlemechs yet, unless one of you has been secretly showing him mech-based anime or something. The hanging from a plane thing is more steampunk, another genre he hasn’t had exposure to (beyond thematic elements in Miyazaki films) though knowing him, I’m surprised the robot doesn’t hang from a dirigible.

We’re kind of proud.

Weekend Roundup

This was a glorious weekend. The weather was spectacular: it was brilliantly sunny and the temperature hovered between sixteen and twenty degrees.

Friday night I attended the rehearsal for the handfasting I was priestessing on Saturday. I didn’t know these women before I was referred to them, but I’ve really enjoyed working with them. They’re funny, loving, and the just right kind of people, you know? Their friends are equally fun, and we spent a lot of the two walk-throughs giggling. It relaxed everybody.

Saturday morning I had some errands to run, and I took the boy with me. “Mama,” he whispered as I buckled him into the car. “You know what we could do? We could go to Tim Horton’s.” He was so funny that I had to laugh, and decided that sure, we could have a treat. Well, the treat turned into a crisis, because as I pulled up to the drive-through speaker I said, “What doughnut do you want, the chocolate-covered one?” and he said yes. So I ordered him a chocolate-glazed doughnut and myself a maple-glazed one. I handed him his bag as we pulled around front and he pulled the doughnut out, then his face crumpled up. “Mama,” he said, “you made a mistake, you got the wrong doughnut!” And then I remembered that he and HRH had been sharing the occasional Boston Cream doughnut, and that I had, indeed, misunderstood and erred in my order. I apologised, we parked the car, and went inside to order the right kind for him. They were out of chocolate-glazed Boston Creams, but they did have maple-glazed; the boy decided that he was game to try one, and loved it. So a tragedy was turned into an exciting new discovery. (And I got an extra doughnut out of it.)

We stopped by Ceri and Scott’s house for fifteen minutes so we could trade books and I could drop off things to be taken to the monthly Random Colour craft session that I was going to miss. Then we went to Pointe-Claire Village to select chocolates for birthday and handfasting gifts, and a lovely little pair of heart-shaped Peruvian hammered silver earrings for my goddaughter’s eight birthday. Then it was back home for lunch and a rest for the boy, and I got ready for the ceremonies I was priestessing.

The handfasting was absolutely beautiful. The couple has been legally married for seven years but chose to have a spiritual service to celebrate their seventh anniversary, and to have their infant daughter named on the same day. No matter how many times you walk through something, when the actual day comes and it’s the real thing, everything is special and meaningful and so much more moving. I was complimented by guests several times for beautiful services, and every time I pointed out that the couple had written them and they should get the credit. The couple finally pointed out to me in return that anyone could have read it in a monotone: I may have had good material with which to work, but I made it special for them. There is a certain return in blessings; when you bless someone else in a ritual or rituals like this, you’re blessed in turn by their joy and love for one another. This was the first time I’ve ever performed such a deeply meaningful ritual for someone I didn’t already know, and I’m deeply thankful that it was such a joyful experience.

When I got home there was an e-mail waiting for me from Miranda, asking if we still had our baby swing. We checked, and we did, so we bundled everyone into the car and brought it over to her. We finally got to meet baby Tristan, who is just one month old. We had to cancel our earlier visit two weeks ago, so we were very happy to have an excuse to stop by and see him. A couple of days earlier Miranda had asked me if I would perform his naming ceremony, which I agreed to do immediately, and I was glad to be able to meet him before the day of the actual ritual! The excellent day continued with a brief visit with the Preston-LeBlancs, where we dropped off their birthday gifts and chatted for a quarter of an hour before finally heading home.

Sunday morning was the monthly Pagan playgroup meeting, where we talked about a potential camping trip for the families late this summer, made tissue paper flowers for Beltane, and worked on a new circle-casting song. And there were healthier snacks! The group has grown yet again.

We went home for lunch and the boy only had a brief lie-down before he got up again; it looks like we’re down to one nap per weekend. At two-thirty the boy and I packed up and headed out for the West Island Youth Symphony Orchestra‘s free concert called “1910 – A Celebration in Music,” programmed to celebrate the city of Beaconsfield’s centenary. The last time I heard the WIYSO was, erm, sixteen years ago, when I was looking for a cello teacher. Not only was this a chance for me to actually attend a concert (imagine! live orchestral music that I wasn’t playing!), it was an opportunity to share a concert-going experience with my son. And finally, I’d also have the chance to see my new conductor in action with a different group. I explained to the boy that this orchestra was made up of kids, and he immediately asked if he could join. I told him that these were older kids, but in four three years (holy cats) he would be eligible to join the junior orchestra, if he liked.

I let him choose where we sat in the auditorium (on the cello side, halfway between the wall and the aisle; we had the whole row to ourselves), and he explored the fold-down seats and asked all sorts of questions about the theatre (he thought we were going to a movie theatre, for some reason). When the lights went down for the orchestra to tune, he caught sight of the conductor just offstage, and he turned to me. “It’s Stewart!” he said with great excitement, and I had to laugh; he made it sound like he and the conductor were old buddies.

Overall, he was very good. They played the music “all in a row,” as he told HRH back home; in other words, there was no intermission, and the concert lasted just over an hour. He was a bit squirmy, climbing from his seat to my seat to the seat on my other side, or lying down across my lap with his sweater over him as a blanket, but he wasn’t disruptive or distracting, and we never needed to resort to pulling out his books or colouring books. His first favourite bit was the Maple Leaf Rag (who can resist ragtime?), and he pretended to play a trombone through it, humming into his straw bottle of apple juice and moving his free hand forward and back in front of him. The guy sitting behind us thought it was hilarious. The Joplin was blown out of the water by Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, however. It may have been partially due to the fact that in the music he could hear the story that Stewart had briefly outlined for the audience before the piece began. “Mama,” he whispered during the first movement, “do firebirds have fur?” “No,” I said, “they have beautiful, long feathers made of flames.” “Not the babies,” he said authoritatively. “They have fuzz.” “Oh,” I said, “so they get their fire-feathers when they grow up?” “Yes,” he said, quite firmly.

He crawled onto my lap at one point to snuggle, and had his head on my shoulder when the first crashing chord of the Danse Infernale began. He must have jumped six inches into the air before sitting straight up and staring at the orchestra. I had to try very hard not to giggle, and I could hear the guy behind us muffling a snicker, too. The boy sat up very straight and applauded loudly when it was over, the first piece for which he’d done so with such enthusiasm. He talked about it had been the best part of the concert and about firebirds and baby firebirds all the way out and through the parking lot, to the amusement of other patrons. It seems that my son is a budding Stravinsky fan.

He’d been so good that we picked up a bonus doughnut on the way home (chocolate-glazed Boston Cream, this time).

Throughout the weekend, HRH finished moving us out of the basement room we’d been using as an office with the upstairs neighbours. We can’t afford the extra money each month, not when our half of the rent for that room is equivalent to the cost of the gas we use monthly. So HRH has moved us and our laundry equipment back into the garage, which is even cosier than it was in its first incarnation of his office, and has the added bonus of now having room for the table we sit around to game once a month or so. We purged a lot of stuff, as well. It’s currently a bit tight, but people will be coming to remove some of the equipment we’ve been holding for them over the next couple of weeks, so we’ll be able to actually get the bikes in and out again.

Fifty-Eight Months Old!

One of the boy’s favourite things to do this past month was check on Molly the barn owl who had laid her first clutch of eggs in California. Her nesting box has a webcam in it, and it’s been really interesting to watch the process. Every morning before he went to school and every day as soon as he got home, and sometimes before bed, too, he’d ask to watch her. He saw the first couple of owlets once they’d hatched, and watched a recorded video of the third hatching. He really enjoyed flipping through the other recordings available, particularly of the male owl dropping, and of Molly eating various rodents and rabbits with great gusto. “Let’s watch the one where she eats the rat!” he’d say, and enjoy the somewhat grisly performance with great relish. “What’s that crunch sound?” he said the first time he saw it. “That’s the rat tearing apart,” I said. “Oh, good,” he said, and enjoyed it all the more. He learned how to write ‘owlet’, too:

(I am just as tickled that one of the words he knows how to write on his own is ‘owlet’ as I was when the word ‘book’ was among the first five words he learned to say.)

His writing is really firming up, and so is his reading. He can get two or three pages into a picture book before he decides it’s too much effort and tells me to finish it on my own. I find it interesting that when he writes his name, the first and third letters are capitalsed, but the second and fourth are lowercase. I’m amused by his vocabulary, too. In his stories, for example, ships don’t come back to be fixed, they “return for repairs.” The stories he tells and his imaginative play are becoming ever richer; they start in the morning, especially when he’s got his shoes and coat on and is saying goodbye to me, and carry on in the car with HRH all the way to school. Sometimes he gets distracted by the stories and loses sight of what he’s supposed to be concentrating on. He’s getting really scary-good at Lego. I am told that preschool has to invest in more to keep up with him. Heck, at the rate we’re going, we’ll have to invest in more to keep up with him. (And with HRH building all sorts of spaceships at the boy’s command.)

When the winter boots were put away we discovered that last fall’s shoes barely fit him, so he has new ones now. They’re size 11 shoes, which means that he grew two shoes sizes over the winter. He’s in size 4 clothes, edging into size 5 tops. The naps are pretty much a thing of the past, but that doesn’t stop us from gently insisting on a lie-down after lunch on weekends. On the days when he doesn’t have even a brief a nap at preschool, he sometimes falls asleep in the car on the way home.

It’s great to see his abilities improve by comparing last year’s seasonal arts and crafts projects with this year’s. He brings home spring or Easter crafts and I think about last year’s, and it’s so easy to see how much more sophisticated the current ones are. His current favourite movie is The Princess and the Frog, which is growing on me after a somewhat neutral response to it when I saw it in the theatre at Christmas. The current favourite books are his collection of Henry and Mudge stories, possibly because he’s learning to read them and so is rediscovering them in a way. He mouths the words while I read them.

Just before Easter we were in a pharmacy and he saw the racks of stuffed animals alongside the chocolate. “Blackie needs a little friend,” he confided in me. “He has lots,” I pointed out. And it is true, there is a minor collection of rabbits in various sizes that he has amassed from various places. “No, he needs a new friend for Easter,” I was told. I almost picked one up when buying the chocolate eggs for our hunt, but decided against it. A good thing, too, because he ended up coaxing his grandma into buying another black and white one while they were out shopping on Easter weekend instead. So he has a new bunny about whom we had a serious discussion concerning names. He wanted to name it Blackie-Whitey, which would have been confusing since we already have one. I got him to agree to Whitey-Blackie. And then we had a couple of talks over the next couple of days about how we don’t stop playing with our old friends when we have new ones; Blackie isn’t allowed to be left behind just because there’s a fluffy, soft, new bunny with a shiny ribbon in the house. He’s handed it very well, actually: they take turns cuddling with him, or he has me take both out of his room at night ( “Mama,” he said, “please take my bunnies, because they are being disturbing and keeping me awake.”) And he left both at home on his first day back at school after Easter. We were concerned that he was going to glom onto it, and we’ve already done some work on getting him to stop bringing Blackie everywhere, but he’s been very good about it all.

And of course, the biggest news this past month: NEW BIKE! FIRST TWO-WHEELER!

He’s really growing fast. I say that every other month, I know, but that’s because I marvel continually at how steep the learning curve is for children, and how rapidly they assimilate new information.

Two months till he’s five years old. Just under five months till kindergarten. I’m going to stop the monthly posts on his fifth birthday, and just stay with random boy-themed posts when they come up.