Category Archives: The Boy

Memo To The Weather Gods

Hi, it’s me. You probably know me as the wife of that guy who works with you sometimes. He’s fine, thanks. I’m actually writing to address a certain anomaly many people in the area witnessed this morning.

Said anomaly was white, small, fleck-like, and swirling around in the air, and is usually referred to as “snow.”

Now, I know we live in a place that has freaky weather. Eastern Canada is cool that way. However, I think this particular anomaly was a wee bit too much for most of us today. After all, on our street the trees all still have their leaves, and most are still green.

I suspect there is a motivating factor in this case, and that motivating factor’s name would be Liam. Yes, you might remember him from that little debacle last summer where he stood on a chair on the back deck, leaned forward into the storm, spread his arms and cried, “Thunder and lightning! Come play with Liam!” Well, for the past week he’s been saying eagerly, “Maybe snow will fall from those clouds!”

Weather Gods, I completely understand how adorable and persuasive he can be. I get it. But handing him snow just because he keeps asking? That’s a certain road to spoiling the child. Next thing we know it will be early July and plus thirty degrees and you’ll be handing out the snow because you no longer know how to say no to him. We just can’t have that.

The way to avoid certain disaster is to gently but firmly refuse his pleas and leading statements. Trust me, this will make your relationship with him far more rewarding in the long run.

I’m glad we’ve had the opportunity to chat about this. Just so we’re clear: no more early snow just because Liam’s asking for it. Pretty and/or decorative snow after the first of November is more acceptable, but really, the serious stuff doesn’t have to happen till December.

Best,

Autumn

P.S.: Really enjoyed the sun this fall. Nice work.

Weekend Roundup

As much as I would love this to be detailed, point form is the only way I’m going to be able to record it and still have time for, you know, breathing.

FRIDAY:

Morning: Running errands. The boy dawdles and doesn’t listen to repeated instructions, and develops a very annoying pattern of taking six steps then falling to his knees, hanging off my hand. Despite this, he is in a good mood. I carry him bodily out of Sears and give him a sound talking-to back at the car. We do not find the birthday gift we planned to pick up. Also, somewhere during the very first stop I lose the list detailing All The Other Things We’re Supposed To Pick Up. Ergo, I forget them. We do, however, acquire a ball for the boy to bring out to the country with us (see ‘Saturday,’ below).

Afternoon: Arthur comes to visit!!! (And we get to briefly see Curtana too.) For the rest of the day we have two giggly boys who bound through the house, build fantastic train layouts, and make loud but enthusiastic music. Dinner, bath, jammies, then a special treat of curling up on the chesterfield under a throw with bowls of popcorn and a brand new Thomas hour-long film to watch, which means Liam gets to stay up and hour and a bit past his bedtime. (Thank you, Pierce Brosnan, for making the narration not completely irritating to listen to.) Arthur is collected at a quarter to nine. Liam is sad but the fun they had during the day wins out mood-wise. The boy falls dead asleep at nine on the dot. Wow.

SATURDAY:

Morning: HRH heads out to get the oil changed and to pick up the housewarming gift I forgot on Friday. He comes back to collect us, we put a wee bit of gas in the car, and grab breakfast for the trip out to the Coalition Stronghold. I figure out that the reason I’m squinting is because I forgot to put my glasses on before we left, and naturally I don’t carry my extra pair any more. Back home; pick up glasses; hit highway. Liam pulls out his blanket and BunBun, arranges himself, and falls asleep at 10:45. Argh! HRH and I enjoy the drive to Maxville, appreciating the autumn trees and the golden sun. The boy wakes up when we turn onto a gravel road. Well, at least he got about seventy minutes of sleep. Too bad it was two hours early.

Afternoon: We relax at the Coalition Stronghold, the new abode of t! and Jan. We have the place and out hosts to ourselves for a while before the next car shows up. In the meantime the boy’s track is set up and the trains run, and HRH and I are handed bottles of beer that we cannot find in Quebec. Yay, colonial loyalty! More friends show up; there are hugs and news exchanged. HRH, the boy, and I go for a walk into the back forty behind the Coalition Stronghold through mowed and unmowed fields to see the pond. There are no ducks on said pond, which disappoints the boy mightily. When back, I try to get the boy to lie down for a nap. It might have succeeded if someone hadn’t opened the closed door while exploring the house, causing Liam to jump up and greet them enthusiastically. Ah well. There is food that mysteriously aggregates on the dining room table, and an impromptu Scrabble game that Lu wins. More friends show up, just as we leave to be home in time for a proper wind-down, dinner, bath, and bed. We bring our winter order of organic beef home with us; the size of the roasts and hamburger packages are perfect. Our chest freezer is full. We will have to shift things or pack them in canny fashion in order to fit the 15ish pounds of pork we have coming in soonish as well. We also gas up in Ontario. Gas for under a dollar a litre! Whee!

Evening: Coven meeting, at which the ritual we’re leading at next weekend’s all-day retreat is approved by all, and some final questions noted down to pass along to the other participants.

SUNDAY:

Morning of cleaning and housework and errands. I roll three balls of yarn, two necessary because Gryffindor weaselled them out of hiding and neutralised the dangerous woolly threats by turning them into hopeless messes. I hem that new pair of pants I got last week. After lunch I head out for a baby shower, which is lovely, but which I have to leave early because I have my first cello lesson to attend. I wear my funky red shoes for confidence at the lesson, and those new pants. I mistime the travel and realize I’ll be half an hour early if I go straight there, so I stop at the needlework shop to buy the needles I need for my next knitting project. (Note: ‘Next’ implies I’ve ever finished one. I have failed miserably at every knitting project I’ve ever tried. But I have begun a new one [armwarmers for me] and have decided to heroically attempt a hat for the newly hairless Mousme.) I go from the needlework shop to my lesson and am ten minutes early anyway. Sigh. I make a critical decision and unpick the new hems on my pants with my Swiss army knife. When someone else shows up for the group lesson I unload the cello and walk into my teacher’s house behind her. I enjoy myself, after the initial ‘oh hell I’m the only one who doesn’t know anyone here’ discomfort. Once the group lesson itself begins, to my surprise I do not suck. (See ‘Expanded Cello Stuff,’ below.) Home for dinner made by HRH, a really awesome steak done on the barbecue. Put boy to bed, then sit down for an hour and hammer out the phrasing for ‘Itsumo Nando Demo’. Go to bed, read, fall asleep.

All in all, a Very Good Weekend.

EXPANDED CELLO STUFF:

It was odd: I was both nervous and not about this lesson. My first lesson was supposed to be a private one last Thursday, but last week was a disaster of sick people and forcing four days of work into two, so it didn’t happen. Instead, the once-a-month group lesson ended up being my first. I am, as I repeatedly point out and people seem to disbelieve because I do an impressive job pretending otherwise, extremely shy, so walking into an established social group of ten people was daunting. What’s the etiquette? Where do I put my stuff? Did I take someone’s parking spot? Am I sitting in someone’s customary seat? At the same time, I knew my teacher and one other student, having played with them in the orchestra for seven and three years respectively, so I had something of a lifeline. The little coffee break between the youngest cellists’ lesson and the group lesson was the most awkward, so awkward for me that I took a cup of coffee to have something to do with my hands (and it was really, really good coffee too, which was nice). Eventually we settled and our teacher put us in various places around the room, we tuned, and started playing.

This is the point where I actually relaxed. I know, I know; normally I’d be tense about playing in a small group with people I don’t know. But somewhere a couple of minutes in, I realised that I didn’t suck. I am used to expecting to be/actually being of a lower technical proficiency than others. Here I was at par with, or even more confident than, others in the group. The beginning was rocky because I was having trouble hearing my intonation, but then something clicked and then it was all okay. There was the disaster of misplacing my hand badly when I had to go really high up while sight-reading an arrangement of Satie’s ‘Gymnopedie’, but hey, sight-reading for fun; no harm, no foul. (Lovely, lovely pieces in that Cellobrations collection for cello quartet, I hope we play lots of them in the future.) I enjoyed it all so much that I played one of the new pieces I was given at the lesson when I got home while the boy was in the bath ( “Is Mama playing her cello for me? While I’m in the bath?” followed by appreciative applause when I’d done), and after I’d put him to bed I sat down for another hour and really worked on bowings and phrasing for the song Sandman7 and I are working on. It took me the whole hour to play bits with different bowings, make a decision one way or the other, and put slurs and bowings in for the entire piece to get it to where I was happy with the phrasing. Next comes recording it while I play it in this version and listening to it to see if it actually works from an audience POV.

Also, my teacher showed us the most adorable Twinkle bow, a fully functional miniature bow used to teach children how to hold it properly and to use the proper wrist and elbow motions. Because it’s so tiny you can’t help but hold it properly in order to get the maximum yield from the hair. We squealed when we saw it.

I think that’s a decent summary of the weekend. We loved having Arthur over. I had a terrific beginning to my first lessons in ten years. I saw people I only get to see once in a while both at the housewarming and at the baby shower (including the mother-to-be!). We really, really enjoyed being out in the country on Saturday. We want to try to visit the Coalition Stronghold at least once a month, but realistically it will likely end up being every six weeks or so.

It was wonderful to have such a positive weekend.

I think that’s about it. The end.

Standing Still

Lowest voter turnout ever. Well, since 1898. I’m disgusted.

We spent election night drinking Quebec ice cider, Nova Scotia beer, local venison-cranberry pate, and baked local Brie. How much more Canadian can you get?

Far more interesting than the Official Federal Election In Which Nothing Happened was the Student Vote program, a project designed to educate children and teenagers about the election process and the structure of government. Students assessed platforms, debated, listened to candidates who were willing to meet them, and finally ‘voted’ and ‘elected’ 100 Conservative seats, 66 NDP seats, 54 Liberal seats, 44 Green seats, and 24 Bloc seats. Take a good look, people; these are tomorrow’s voters.

In other news, we had an absolutely lovely weekend with my parents. The weather was lovely; the food was incredible (as always). The only drawback was Liam coming down with a cold and his first case of conjunctivitis, which we caught right at the beginning before it got bad and thus was cleared up before we left for home. (Well, okay, there was that other drawback of having to wade through two hours of traffic to get out of Montreal, and experience so awful that we came very close to turning around and going home. Except to go home would have taken us the same amount of time that continuing to get out of the city would take. You know, that whole ‘I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er’ thing. And had it taken any longer there very well might have been blood.)

Naturally I have the cold now too, and mine are always worse than the boy’s. It’s like he amps them as he passes them along. He stayed home yesterday and we ran errands together. “We’re going to vote for the government!” he told everyone with great excitement when we went to the bank, the grocery store, the place where I bought pants, and where he got his hair cut. The actual voting was anti-climatic for him though once he’d helped me find the polling booth by number (although he kept trying to steer me toward 126 instead of 136). We were in a school gymnasium, and he was very distracted by the climbing bars and the benches against the wall. I voted very quickly in order to lunge and catch him before he got more than a foot off the ground and up those bars.

After a very overcast day, the sun broke through for the most glorious autumnal end of afternoon glow. There was a warm wind all day. It was a beautiful full moon last night, and when we lit our Happy Full Moon candle at the altar before the boy’s bedtime he chirped, “Thank you, Goddess, for all the things in the world!”

Also, I found three pairs of jeans that fit me that were all on sale. And I only have to hem one of them.

Forty Months Old!

Or three and a third years old, for those counting in years.

“What are you going to dress up as for Hallowe’en?” Liam asked us excitedly at dinner the other night. HRH and I looked at one another, and we both grinned. It’s been ages since we did costumes (would they have been for the last superhero party, or the final Hallowe’en party t! threw?). Suddenly here was our son encouraging us to do the Hallowe’en thing, because as far as he knows everyone dresses up at Hallowe’en. We have no time to do new costumes for ourselves; any costume-creation effort will be focused on him. So I gave my costume wardrobe a quick once-over in my mind and said, “I think I’ll go as Belle.” “Oh, Mama,” he said, “that’s a great idea!” HRH has decided to make himself an Incredibles t-shirt to wear to school, so I think that will be the extent of his costume. As for what the boy will be wearing, we are not yet sure. There is the pirate coat we planned for last year that never got made, and apart from that he has alternately decided to be Dash from the Incredibles, Mr. Incredible, and a diesel locomotive. I suspect we will have to set a deadline for a final decision. This year will be the first year he goes out trick or treating, and I believe he expects us both to go out with him (because again, as far as he knows, everyone does it!). Must check with the upstairs neighbours to see if they would be good with handling kids at the door while we go out for half an hour.

Over the past couple of months he has developed an odd use of the third person to describe himself and his actions, as if he is narrating the activity of a character in a story. “Mama, said the [kitten/robot/fish/whatever he is pretending to be today], what are we having for lunch?” he’ll say. It’s interesting.

He’s sleeping really well, anywhere between an hour and a half and two hours of nap in the early afternoon, and ten hours at night. And he’s so close to making it through all those ten hours at night completely dry. Sometimes he manages it, sometimes he doesn’t. And when he doesn’t it’s usually the wetting that wakes him up just before our scheduled wake-up time, and he’s so upset and frustrated. (Jury’s out regarding the classification of the amount of frustration connected with the wetting, and the amount associated with being jolted awake before he would wake up on his own.)

School continues to go very well. They call him their sparkplug (familiar, what?), the one whose enthusiasm and energy gets everyone else active and involved. He plays with the older kids, then goes to the younger kids, and then to the kids his own age, and integrates seamlessly into each group; apparently he’s the only one who ranges between groups like that. The CD player was being fixed when he started school, but when it came back and they did a unit on music he was right there, attentive and interested. It’s his favourite thing there, or at least the one that keeps his attention the longest, we’re told. He brings home new songs all the time (not that we recognize them, because although he is enthusiastic he is not necessarily reproducing them correctly), and loves songs with actions accompanying them. The other day he was making odd vowel sounds to the tune of Frère Jacques, one of the tunes they adapt a lot at preschool, then saying someone’s name: “[vowel sound] [vowel sound] Heidi, [vowel sound] [vowel sound] Heidi…” It took me a half hour of hearing him sing this to himself while playing before it clicked and suddenly it made sense. He was singing the morning welcome song ( “Where is Ashley, where is Ashley? Here she is, here she is!”) in French. Ou est Heidi? Aha.

His food preferences have no consistency that I can see. He refused applesauce for months, and has enthusiastically eaten bowls of it for the past two weeks. Every time I made homemade macaroni and cheese for dinner he’d cry and ask for plain noodles, but last night he dug in to the bowl I put in front of him with gusto and even had seconds. At breakfast he asks for a mélange of Rice Krispies, Cheerios, Shreddies, and organic kamut flakes in various combinations. Cold pancakes are still a great snack. Oatmeal is back. Apparently he wasn’t eating well at school lunches, pushing things around his plate and saying, “I don’t like it,” but that’s been worked out (part of it was low appetite leading into the cold then the tummy bug thing, part of it was a sudden discomfort with the schedule, yet another part was that he was having huge breakfasts and enthusiastic mid-morning snacks and thus not hungry at lunch). The deal at home is you eat three big bites of what’s on your plate and if you decide you don’t like or want it, you can politely refuse the rest, but we’re not going to make you something else. Generally it’s not an issue, and if it is for some reason, he learns that being hungry later isn’t so much fun. We’re not in the least concerned that he won’t eat enough; that will never be a problem!

In general he’s still a cheerful, inventive, imaginative boy with great enthusiasm for just about everything. He loved bringing his carrots into school to share with all his friends there, and told them that he helped plant them, water them, and harvest them. He and Gryff have been celebrating the turn of the season by galumphing up and down the hall, chasing one another. Falling leaves mean playing in piles of them, messing about with sticks, and finding very cold bumblebees to tuck into the garden in hopes that they will find a warm place in which to hibernate. Decreasing hours of daylight means getting ready for the day in the morning when it’s still dark, and going to bed when the sun has gone down. “Maybe it will snow from those clouds!” he says eagerly. Everything is interesting and fun. And it’s good to have someone discovering fun things around.

Dragging Oneself Into Monday

Oh gods. So. very. sick.

I find it moderately unfair that this seems to be getting worse as it’s passed along to each family member. The boy had the collywobbles first on Thursday night and threw up once, then just had an upset tummy on Friday. HRH had the collywobbly tummy on Saturday and part of Sunday. I had the usual getting-sick powering-down of energy on Sunday, but didn’t actually manifest anything until 1:42 AM last night, at which time I woke up and thought I was going to die. And then I proceeded to stay awake for three hours, thinking I was going to die. I moved to my office and tried to distract myself by transposing a song Sandman7 and I want to play together at some point, which was surprisingly successful, checked on the sleeping boy a few times (including sitting down on the floor next to his bed, putting an arm around him and lying my cheek on his side to cuddle him as he slept), and finally got back to my own bed to sleep around 4:30. And then an hour later a damned cat knocked over the screen that gives them privacy in the litterbox, which sounded like a gunshot and woke both HRH and I up… and the boy too. I got up to check what it was, stomped back to bed and fell asleep. I woke up around 7:00 with the boy burrowing into bed next to me with his stuffed Maggie-cat in one hand and BunBun in the other, so we could both cuddle something. It was nice to snuggle him till it was almost time for him and HRH to hit the road to their respective schools. I waved as usual and then stumbled back to bed.

I woke up again at 9:30, still feeling moderately oh-gods-I-want-to-die, and then realised (A) with great argh that it was in fact October 6, which was Mousme’s date to have her head shaved live on radio for the Shave to Save campaign for breast cancer… at 8:00 AM, which had been ninety minutes earlier; and (B) with a bit of panic that the landlord was coming by this morning to power-wash the garage door in preparation for painting it this week. So I leapt out of bed and scrambled myself into some sort of reputable state, and here we are.

Collywobbles and upset stomachs and wanting to die aside, we all had a lovely weekend. The weather was beautiful and crisp. On Saturday HRH acquired an Xbox 360 at a hundred dollars off the customary price (!) (“I shouldn’t do this,” he fretted, so I helpfully enabled him by pointing out that if he ever wanted to play a new Xbox game again he’d have to buy one at some point), I acquired a new cell phone (which is black and very light, and we have discovered that the back has red sparkles in it when you angle it properly in the sun), and the boy acquired a new Thomas the Tank Engine DVD (because wow are we sick of the ones we have). After everyone napped we hied ourselves to Tal’s housewarming party where we saw many friends, including some I hadn’t seen in fifteen years (let me tell you, it was odd to sit on a blanket chest with girls I’d last seen ages and ages ago, all talking about our kids) and others who I’d always seen at parties but never had the chance to speak with (parties for me tend to be ‘hit the people you know and exchange essential info ASAP because eek, look, a crowd’). The boy had a wonderful time galumphing around with two older children, who seemed cheerfully willing to galumph with someone less than half their age and whose father was willing to galumph around outside with them in the first fallen leaves of the autumn, along with HRH. When we said it was time to go the boy just stood there next to his newfound friends and burst into tears. “A sign that things have gone well,” their father said, and we shared knowing looks.

On Sunday HRH started putting the gardens to bed for the winter. The biggest part of this was harvesting all the damn carrots, a job he shared with the boy who has taken a big bunch of them to school today for show and tell and snacking, greens still on and everything (because how much do you want to bet that most of these kids have never seen a carrot that’s just been pulled from the ground?).

And now I get to settle down and do another manuscript evaluation, assuming it’s actually arrived in my work folder. It hadn’t on Friday, despite the notification that it had been assigned. I need some time away from Orchestrated anyhow, after the numbing sprint over the past two weeks.

Odd

Liam was singing Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s ‘Homeless’ today in the car. I’m serious. He sang:

Somebody say ih hih ih hih ih
Somebody sing hello, hello, hello
Somebody say ih hih ih hih ih
Somebody cry why, why, why?

He’s heard it on Sarah McLachlan’s Rarities, B-Sides, and Other Stuff Vol 2 a few times (I only have Graceland on cassette, more’s the pity, and there is no tape player in the house). I was quite surprised to hear him do it, though, and do it so accurately. He’s also been doing excellent renditions of “The Rainbow Connection”, sometimes the original song Kermit sings in the swamp, sometimes the version at the end of The Muppet Movie (“that’s part of what rainbows do…”).

Speaking of the boy, I am off to collect him. First I have to drop that DVD off and buy a binder at the dollar store, though.

The Joys of Being Sick

My ears have just spontaneously (I assume) unblocked, thank the gods. I hate being sick, and my body has arrived at the achy body/chills/headache stage of the Game of Ill. All three of us are sick. The boy seems to be the one who’s operating at the best level of efficiency; HRH and I have been dragging ourselves through the week.

I wrote the boy’s 39 month post early last week, saved it, and evidently forgot to publish it. I’ve just done that; it’s here. Annoying as all heck, because for once I finally did it on time.

I am at the ‘I suck at writing’ stage of the book, too. Why do I do this? No one is ever going to want to buy it. Doesn’t something else have to be happening, something important? What’s the point of telling a story if it doesn’t examine something deep and philosophical and life-changing? And I suspect that it might be better told as a first-person narrative. I’m going to stick to the third person until I’m absolutely convinced it would be better in the first, though. This is just my inner critic trying to stop me from getting anything done.

I have zero energy. Stupid achy cold. This is what I used to feel like all the time. I’m so grateful that the fibro was diagnosed and that I’m taking something for it now. How did I operate like this for weeks at a go?