Category Archives: The Boy

Belated Weekend Roundup

Okay, here we go.

Thursday night: Marc’s vocal concert, at which I unashamedly cried because I’m so darn proud of him. He gets better every year, and his range is really expanding. (I mean vocal range, but the style of songs he’s exploring is also broadening.) There were about ten of us there, and it’s always fun to sit with friends at this kind of thing. We are all about the support.

Friday: Lunch meeting with Marisol, at which I was much more with it than the meeting we had in late winter. We nattered about a bunch of different things connected with her thesis, which she’s trying to recast as a personal memoir and anthropological exploration of language, cultural origin, and spirituality, specifically in Quebec with all its wackiness. It’s fascinating. I know nothing about anthropology, but I made a few suggestions to help make it more attractive for marketing and she’s all excited and fired up to begin. It’s fun helping someone uncover and refine their focus. Then I wandered around downtown in the sun for a bit, hitting the Body Shop and Lush and a used bookstore, where I scored copies of Deborah Lipp’s The Study of Witchcraft, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, and Robert Jourdain’s Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, all of which I’ve been wanting to read. (Eclectic, that’s me.) The boy begins showing evidence of a cold.

Saturday: Errands, mainly going out to pick up a gift certificate for Jeff and Pasley’s eleventh wedding anniversary, and prep for the family dinner. The big event of the day is the boy’s family birthday party. This is kind of blurry for me, as I was low on energy and doing stuff, but it went well. Everyone arrived around four, was served a drink, and the boy opened his presents. We were somewhat shocked to watch him tear one open then another and another without pausing to appreciate what was inside, which is most unlike him. We suspect an unintentionally misleading gift bag with a large WALL*E on it, which led him to think there was a large WALL*E toy he’s been coveting inside, so when he found clothes he kind of rifled through them and then turned to the next large thing, expecting to find it. Once everything was open he did go back to each gift one by one to explore it, though. There was a simple Millennium Falcon kit, a bug terrarium, new Lego, and Transformers, which wowed him thoroughly. He got me to open them right away, and grabbed Bumblebee from my hands. I said, “Just a second, I’ll show you how to…” and didn’t bother to finish because the four year old who’s never seen a Transformer before went flip-flip-flip and transformed it from car to robot in no time flat, then back again. (HRH and I = very proud. Also, go us for choosing a cool toy.)

Dinner was excellent: wet-brined home-cut pork chops glazed with a Dijon/maple syrup/beef bouillon glaze, and grilled vegetables, preceded by various seafood hors d’oeuvres courtesy of our mothers, and followed by a chocolate cake with vanilla icing, upon which the boy had scattered sugar dinosaurs. There was a lot of wine consumed. The boy went to bed around nine, two hours later than usual. Yikes.

Sunday: I slept horribly and woke up thoroughly ill. The boy and HRH made the Millennium Falcon while I tried to get some more sleep. We met Mum and Dad at their motel and headed over to Ceri and Scott’s house, because Mum was giving Ceri her old spinning wheel for the sunroom. (An antique great or walking wheel, for those who are interested and wondering why I didn’t jump on it; it’s technically functional, but it’s a Saxony style and I have no room for it, and I’m looking for a modern compact castle-style wheel.) The medication I took for the cold started kicking in and I don’t remember much about the visit other than it was sunny and we were outside for most of it. We stopped at La Belle Province and had hot dogs and french fries for lunch, then went back home and the boy conked out for two hours straight. Mum and Dad joined us later and we had a very pleasant visit. Once the boy was up things moved outside, and I was so out of it I couldn’t drag myself out after them all; I lay down and read. My parents left early, and HRH fed the boy while I went to bed. We ended up having to cancel our late dinner out with friends, because I was non-functional. (I remember hearing HRH call to cancel, and him using the phrase “she has a bit of a cold” and being annoyed, because “she can’t get out of bed” would have been more honest and made the cancellation sound less wishy-washy.

Monday: The boy stayed home from preschool as his cough wasn’t completely gone, thereby annihilating one of my precious work days this week. We got out to wander around and tried to do errands, but were thwarted by lack of stock. I was still dragging myself around with low energy, and cancelled my bi-weekly anime night with Marc. HRH and I ended up watching TV together after the boy went to bed, a very pleasant thing indeed as (a) I don’t get to spend a lot of time alone with HRH these days, (b) I don’t watch TV much but I was curiously in the mood for it last night, and (c) both House and Bones were on back to back, the only two shows I’m even remotely interested in these days, and I had seen neither of the episodes.

Today: Cold mostly gone. Dark and cold and rainy outside. An hour of cello. Baking bread.

And now, to work.

In Which She Drags Herself From Bed

The Weekend Roundup will be late, Gentle Readers. The boy woke up Friday morning with a terrible cold, which he generously shared with me. We were okay for the first birthday celebration of three or four on Saturday, but I was knocked off my game on Sunday, my parents left early, and we cancelled our evening out due to me not being able to stand up straight thanks to a combination of the evil sinus cold and the evil medication I took for it. I was in bed at five-thirty and didn’t get up till seven this morning.

The boy is home with me today because his cough isn’t completely gone, so don’t expect to hear from me overmuch.

The weekend summary: Wonderful in every respect but for the health thing and associated fallout.

Have a good day, everyone.

Meandering

I understand now why I’ve been avoiding doing a second draft of Orchestrated. I have to rework the beginning, and I don’t know how to step into it properly. I’m doing a lot of staring at the renamed document on the monitor, the printout in front of me, and feeling like I’m going nowhere.

In other news, there are four more rehearsal till the Canada Day concert, one of which I will be missing as we’re out of town. I need to work on the speed of the Grieg dances, and to smooth out the shifts of the Ralph Vaughn Williams and the Faure Pavane. But really, that’s it. We’re coming together. So long as everyone keeps up their end of the practise-at-home bargain, we’ll be golden. Gods, I love the Vaughn Williams. But that’s just me; I like RVW to begin with. The cellos get to do a lovely stompy theme in the first movement, and a nice lyrical theme in the second. And because I know the piece well, I can play it better.

HRH cleaned out the garage and sorted things into give away/sell/donate piles, and reorganized the storage area. We can all get to the bikes now. I went through the piles of clothing to donate to the local charities. It’s good to have all that out of the way. It was getting very frustrating not being able to find things down there, or easily access the things we needed. I finally saw the water/mold damage to my lovely thick white office carpet Blade gave me as a birthday gift a few years ago, and it’s awful; it was rolled up with one end resting on the floor and got soaked one day. Just one of the irritating reminders of the past downstairs tenant whose washer leaked regularly, flooding the garage floor (and yet she insisted nothing was wrong, argh). I’m pretty sure a thorough steam cleaning will rescue it, and as the upstairs furniture needs that kind of cleaning too we shall rent one of those special vacuums from the grocery store and go to town one day.

Things are ramping up in the family for the boy’s series of birthday celebrations. This Saturday it’s the family thing, with my parents coming in from out of town to join the local grandparents here. Next Wednesday we’ll send cake and possibly balloons to preschool. Thursday is the day itself, and if the weather’s good we may abscond with the boy and take him to the train museum and lunch out. Then next Saturday is the kid party. That’s two cakes and a batch of cupcakes to make, which also means a lot of icing. I hope butter’s on sale somewhere. We asked him what kind of theme he wanted this year, and it wavered between Star Wars and superheroes for a while, before settling on superheroes. Not that we go deep into the theme thing, we just like to have a loose thing to tie colours and cake and invitations together. This is the first year I haven’t done homemade invitations, which makes me slightly sad, but there’s that whole not having colour ink for the printer and money being tight. (Till, well, today, but today would have been too late for the invitations.) It was less expensive to buy them.

I have just discovered Amanda Palmer. I am, as usual, late to the party. I knew about her, but hadn’t actually heard her music till today. I’m currently listening to Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and it’s excellent. Not something one can just throw in the CD player; it’s a very specific sort of music. But very good. Lovely sting arrangements.

HRH got his provincial tax refund today, which means mine is close behind. Hurrah!

Weekend Roundup

Okay, who allowed this June thing? And why is it still going down to something like five degrees at night? Hello, late spring: We would just like to remind you that summer is twenty-one days away, and if you want to get any love you’d better start warming up to us.

As previously noted, on Friday afternoon after his nap we took the boy to see his first movie in a theatre. We really managed to arrange the best combination of circumstances: the perfect time of day, the perfect film, the perfect age. Go us! We sat in the very back row in case we needed to make a quick exit; he sat on a booster seat and we shared a little kid’s combo of popcorn and the tiny bag of Twizzlers that came with it. He didn’t talk a lot, only made the occasional comment, but he laughed and gasped and said, “That’s silly!” and such things at the appropriate moments. He got slightly upset at something at one point and started to whimper a bit, so I told him that it was all right, that it was just a movie and part of the story, and held his hand. Afterwords he whispered, “Thank you for holding my hand, Mama.” The majority of comments were heartfelt bursts of, “I love you, Mama!” which is shorthand for “I’m having an awesome time!”Up will never be my favourite Pixar film (I honestly can’t say what is at the moment) but they stayed true to their story and their characters, and the execution was as beautiful as it always is. Also, I cried about five or six times; it was very well-told.

Friday night I had my first post-recital cello lesson, where my teacher told me how impressed she’d been with my bow control and intonation. We looked at the current Suzuki 2 piece I’m reviewing, and I get the feeling she thinks I’m going to be done my book 2 review by the end of the month, which just so happens to be the end of her teaching year. We talked about setting up a review plan for the summer and basic prep work for book 3 in the fall. She also reminded me that I take good notes, and to review them regularly to remind myself about pronating hands and dropping shoulders and elbow angles. I feel a bit less panicked about two months without structure now. We finished by looking at some of the tricky passages in the orchestra music, and I’d done very acceptable fingerings for most of it, only really changing one. Was rather proud of that. I must be learning or something.

On Saturday Ceri took me to a spinning workshop as an early birthday present. We sat in the sun on comfy couches and chairs at Ariadne, and learnt about fibre and how to draft and how to use a drop spindle. The instructor looked at us all and said, “Hmm, well, I guess I’ll demonstrate how to use a wheel once we’ve covered plying, because you’ve all caught onto this really quickly and we’ll have the time.” My major problems are connecting a new draft to the draft that’s being spun (my joins come out lumpy); drafting evenly enough so that my resulting yarn is even; and keeping the spindle going with just a single twist of the fingers. I know there’s a technique where one taps the whorl that keeps it going, but we were parking it while we fed the twist up the draft. It was exciting in a relaxing sort of way, if that makes any sense. I demonstrated when we got home, and the boys were duly impressed. Wrapping the single for plying was just as annoying as it had been in the workshop, though. HRH: “Could you… knit with that?” Me: “I could go get needles and do it RIGHT NOW.”

But I didn’t.

Ultimately I’d like to spin enough to string my loom (note to self: using the loom will work better if you have a shuttle and a heddle hook) and make something. As I was falling asleep that night I thought it would be really nice if I could make something for my mother using yarn I’d spun myself and woven on the loom. Evidently there’s still an eager first-grader inside me, sticking macaroni to a tin can and spray-painting it gold to give to her on Mother’s Day. Why do I have such expensive hobbies? I think I’m a relatively simple creature, but I end up playing the cello and spinning. I need to sell another book just to supply myself with accessories and raw material.

Sunday was the multi-family outing to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. The Zouak family had to bow out, as poor ADZO is still recovering from an appendectomy, but everyone else was still on board. Google lied through its virtual teeth when it said it would take just under three hours to get there. It took us two hours, and we ended up knocking about the museum lobby and lunchroom for forty-five minutes waiting for the others. The drive there was wonderful, one of those early summer mornings where all the colours are extra-vivid. The boy was very patient (as patient as someone on the threshold of four years old can be) and was overjoyed when the rest of the party arrived. The museum is half closed, as they’re undergoing extensive renovation, but the holdings that were on display were terrific. Lots of dinosaur bones from Canada, and great life-sized models. The other floors were mammals and birds, all very interesting. There’s some great interactive stuff presented on touch screens, which thrilled the boy because buttons and dials and such are always Very Cool. He’s still at the “what’s around the next corner” stage, which is hard to control when the rest of your party is taking the time to really look at the exhibits, but once we got to the higher floors he started focusing better. It’s a quite remarkable museum, and it was all brilliant enough that we decided we’d be going back next spring once the renovation was complete. We enjoyed our packed lunches in the lunchroom, and we left just after one o’clock for the trip home, knowing the boy, although apparently fine, would very soon reach saturation level. The drive home was not as nice, with dramatic pressure changes back and forth, storm fronts all around, and really dreadful wind.

Overall it was a wonderful weekend. Now, back to work. The anthology galleys are due back tomorrow, and I want to finish a second pass on them. I have a new freelance assignment that’s due on Friday, too (blessedly short). And I came up with two story ideas on the trip to the museum yesterday that I want to noodle about with. One is courtesy of something Liam said while reading a book in the back seat, so I think I will write it for him. It’s going to end up being a short chapter book, possibly for the eight to ten age range. We shall see. It’s quite nebulous at this point.

In Which We Are The Coolest Parents Ever

In half an hour, we will be packing the boy up to take him to a movie theatre for the very first time. Pixar’s Up is opening today, you see.

We switched Grandma’s Fridays for this. And yes, if he was in school, we’d be manufacturing an excuse to keep him home.

Earlier in the week we were concerned and rather disappointed, because the only listings available were for the 3D showings, and there’s no way the boy would be able to sit through an entire film in a movie theatre for the first time and keep a pair of polarized lenses on at the same time. But we checked this morning and to our relief, all the non-3D listings were up as well.

He has been told that there will be popcorn. I said we would share a bag, and I was informed that no, Mama, you could get your own bag.

Right. If he’s not awake within the next five minutes, we’re waking him up.

ETA: He. was. awesome. So was the movie.

Lethargy

Well, to be honest, it’s felt like lethargy, but it’s mostly been workworkwork and headaches, none of which are particularly conducive to writing blog posts. And it would be more of the same old, same old:

Work: Turned a freelance assignment around in five work hours; this is so much easier when the manuscripts are good. Got kudos for struggling through the last one that was so hard to read. Billed for three evaluations in ten work days; very nice. Got the galleys for the anthology, due back in ten days. Found a glaring error in the very first story. Sigh.

Cello: Excellent lesson Tuesday night, with yet another spontaneous appreciative comment from my teacher about how my left hand, confidence, and intonation have all really improved, both in my lesson and ensemble stuff as well as orchestra. Now we just really need to train the final tendencies to lift and lead from the wrist out of my bow hand and we’re good. (Ha ha ha. This is, of course, a lifetime-long struggle.) I was feeling pretty darn good about my celloing. And then yesterday I had another two-hour duet rehearsal with my partner, in which my bow was controlled by aliens. I’m serious. I certainly had no say in what it did. It sounded awful and squeaky and I shall wrap the frog in tinfoil so they don’t do it again during the recital on Sunday. We did good work, but I sounded awful in the duet. It did a real number on my self-confidence.

Weather: Yesterday was sunny with a hot wind; all the windows were open and the scent of lilacs poured in. It almost hit 30 C. For the first time, I officially wore no socks. Hello, summer. Today is damp and overcast and not warm. Hello again, spring.

Food: No interest. Thinking of food to feed other people is hard when you don’t feel like eating.

Boy: He has started drawing people and is very good at it. I nearly cried when he drew one in front of me for the first time. (Representational drawing is a big step; representational drawing of human figures is even bigger.) Language skills continue to freak me out. He’s been guaranteed a full-time preschool slot as of mid-August, which is fabulous, but which also means that I will never have the car to myself on a weekday again come the new fall term. He’s about two-thirds my height, which isn’t tall to begin with, but he’s about to turn four; c’mon. We also found out that the little con artist can and does use the pedals on the school trikes, which he claims he cannot do.

Cats: Cricket has been throwing up her food for a while, so we got her some Hills sensitive-stomach stuff and she’s kept it down just fine. Except Nix has figured out that Cricket’s getting Special Treatment, and won’t eat her own food now: she hooks the new food out from under Cricket’s nose and eats it herself. If we put Cricket in another room to eat, Nixie ignores her own dish entirely. Nixie is pretty much fur, bones, and whiskers and can’t afford to not eat. Scarlet told me about an Iams formula that is good for sensitive stomachs and is cheaper than the Hills, which she feeds to her herd of beasts, so we can feed it to all three cats and no one has to feel left out. Good grief.

HRH has booked today off, as he had a bunch of vacation days he needed to use by the end of May. The tentative plan is to go see the new Star Trek film, except I’ve had an awful headache for the past twelve hours. If it doesn’t get better, I’m calling it off. He’s taking next Thursday and Friday off as well, and the plan for next Friday is to take the boy to see Up in the theatre, his first such outing. It’s probably proof of my lethargy/fibro flareups/perpetual headaches that I’m more excited about next week’s film outing than today’s.

Forty-Seven Months Old!

A mere thirty-two days till he’s four years old. How time flies.

Spelling and reading continue apace. Typeset fonts (think Courier, for example) frustrate him. A typeset lowercase ‘a’ does not look like the lowercase ‘a’ he has been taught to draw by hand, nor does a ‘g’. He is very frustrated by this. Otherwise, words and letters are the most exciting things around these days. He writes his name on paper or the chalkboard all the time, or spells it aloud. He writes words in the air to see if we can identify them. (This is more of a challenge than it may sound. First of all, he’s more enthusiastic than precise, and second of all I’m reading it backwards.) We have discovered together that he very much likes copying words out, so I’ll print words and spell them out as I do, and he copies them onto another paper, spelling them out himself as he does. He’s done a few greeting cards this way. His drawing skills have leapt a couple of levels as well. He drew the first face I’ve seen him draw the other day, and he used the entire chalkboard instead of squeezing it into a corner, spacing the features out remarkably well. And last night he drew two different versions of WALL*E, both extremely recognizable. HRH is, naturally, bursting with pride.

The newest addition to the household is stuffed black rabbit with white paws, whom the boy saw on a post-Easter shelf at the drugstore we stopped at on the way out of Oakville. He instantly fell in love with him, and as it was half-price, I bought it for him. “What are you going to call him?” I asked on the way to the car. “His name is Blackie-Whitie,” Liam said with confidence. And he hasn’t put the darn thing down since that day. He’ll go all shy with people when they talk to him, but he’ll hold out the rabbit and say, “This is my new bunny, his name is Blackie-Whitie.” Sometimes he adds, “His nickname is Blackie,” just so everyone’s clear. Starting in the car on the way home from Easter, he has been saying, “Mama, you can cuddle Bun-Bun” and pushing Bun-Bun at me till I take him in the crook of my arm. We suspect he doesn’t want to hurt Bun-Bun’s feelings, which is very sensitive of him. Otherwise he drags Blackie, Bun-Bun, and the little white rabbit he called Peter until he got another tiny white bunny called Snowball/Blizzard, so the first white one is alternately Peter/Blizzard/Snowball, depending on what the tiny one is called that day) around in his arms at home, and negotiates bringing all three or five along for car rides. (One. He is allowed only one.) Blackie is now somewhat bedraggled. I mourn his silky clean fur.

(Yes, we’re fairly sure his main totem is a rabbit.)

There were two new movies this month. We finally got a copy of 101 Dalmatians on DVD (as well as the new sequel) and he went absolutely bananas over it. The rabbits were all renamed Pongo and Perdita, we played at being Dalmatians, every minivan that parked in the neighbourhood belonged to Horace and Jasper, and every car that went racing down the road and squealed around the corner was Cruella. Then Nightdemons lent us a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, a very loose remake of the book’s story (which he knows), and he went crazy for that as well. Now we are told on a regular basis that someday, Blackie will be a Real Rabbit. Every morning he checks to see if it’s happened. We keep telling him it takes a long time and a lot of cumulative love.

The other big milestones this past month were the purchase of his first board game, Chutes & Ladders (apparently Snakes & Ladders, the UK version, is no longer available in Canada and thus we ended up with the rather preachy US one, hmph), and the purchase of his first set of gaming dice. He is very enthusiastic about Chutes & Ladders, only he thinks the chutes are preferable because in the playground doesn’t one climb a ladder to get to the more exciting slide part? And he chose a d20 from his new dice to roll for his first game, which made it rather short. (His next pick was a d4, which meant the second game was abandoned after taking forever to get anywhere.) So we are working through the inevitable tears when someone else wins (“But I wanted to win!”), and the concept of luck and random dice rolls, and the idea that it isn’t the end of the world if someone else wins; we just set the board up again and start anew. It’s the fun we have playing that counts.

When the boy is about to sing something (which is often these days; he is all about the singing), he lifts his fist to his mouth and clears his throat with a tiny soft sound. I have to try not to laugh every time. In the past week he has become obsessed with “Yellow Submarine,” which is both fortunate and not. It’s an easy song, so we know it and he learned it really quickly, but it’s not exactly deep. On the other hand, when I put our Beatles “1” CD on in the car the other day, he sighed contentedly and said, “This is my favourite music.” Not bad for a kid who’d only heard it once about a year ago.

He met t! and Jan’s year-old husky/shepherd/collie dog Carter over the weekend, and was throughly thrilled. Carter has experienced a streak of bad luck and has gone from a splint to a cast to another splint on his right foreleg, and is currently wearing a Victrola-style collar so the splint doesn’t get chewed. None of this fazed Liam. He giggled and crooned and patted and ruffled the dog’s fur all day. At once point the dog leaned against him with a deep sigh, pushing the boy into the wall, but after a look at HRH to make sure everything was still okay Liam set to scritching the blissful dog with great enthusiasm. At home after a long day, he was eating his grilled cheese sandwich when he said, “What was your favourite part of the day?” I told him what I’d enjoyed, and he said thoughtfully, “My favourite part of the day was meeting and playing with Carter.” And in fact, he has named the small stuffed dog he’s had for two years (previously known by the imaginative name of “Puppy”) Carter. Also while there, he spent a couple of hours jumping around the muddy side field as it was being prepared for the orchard, splashing in puddles, testing various bits of bark and grass and dead leaves to see what floated and what didn’t, and inspecting the family of baby field mice that was found as one of the holes was dug. When he came in for lunch, thoroughly soaked and happy, there were three inches of muddy water in each rainboot. If you can’t be a kid in a place like that, where can you be one?