Category Archives: The Boy

Not The Official Festival Report

Am exhausted. Ran out of spoons mid-Saturday, not long after it started to pour buckets of rain upon the fest. Fortunately, the energy ran out after my workshop; unfortunately, before the other workshops and rituals I’d planned to attend. Sleeping badly all weekend plus two seven-hour car rides did not help. Neither did the energy-sapping damp weather. It’s going to take me about three days to get back into some sort of normal operative mode.

Workshop = success. Yay me. Yay workshop attendees. Yay festival organizers for being an awesome team of awesome people. Love them all with much love.

Sold some books, even. Was also asked to do an article on hearthcraft for Circle Magazine.

Both HRH and I came home from the festival with new blades from Helmut’s Forge. I also acquired a stunning kyanite pendant from Shan, a highly polished cabochon the size of my thumbnail that looks nothing like that Wikipedia photo of the mineral. (Oh, this site has a gallery of cut and polished stones; much better.) Websites variously tell me that kyanite is used for stimulating energy, encouraging clarity and intuition, dispelling anger/confusion/frustration, protecting in energy-sapping situations, facilitating communication, and promoting tranquillity, among other things. We just bought it because it looked pretty.

Stopped by t! and Jan’s new home on the way back yesterday to run around the place (okay, the boy did the running, I did a lot of sitting and drinking a glass of water) and generally admire their house and land. The boy smashed the cats’ water goblet in one of his enthusiastic turns through the kitchen. Sigh.

Finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle last night. Would have been life-changing had I not just read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Started Neal Stephenson’s Anathem this morning and love every word of it.

The boy has a cold; his chest seems congested and he coughs now and again. (Travelling with him was not much fun yesterday.) He stayed home with me till we verified that the preschool takes kids so long as they are not feverish or diarrheaic or have streaming noses, drove him in for ten, dropped the car off for HRH, and metro/bussed home. Walked through the front door at 12:30. Lay down for a while, then hauled myself here to assure you all that no, I is not ded.

Except now, having seen that the world and the Intraweebs did not blow up in my absence (the remnants of Hurricane Ike smashing into the back of the house last night notwithstanding) and my inbox holds nothing of dramatic deadline, I will drag myself off to lie on the couch again and read more Anathem, because I have the energy for nothing else.

Thirty-Nine Months Old!

The biggest news of the past month is, of course preschool. “Bye Mama! I’m going to school!” Liam says jauntily in the morning, and heads down the stairs to the car with HRH. Sometimes I even get a “See you later!” or “Have a good day!” as he waves up at the living room window and then climbs into the car. His teacher called me after
his first two weeks and gave me the update: they love him, he plays enthusiastically with everyone but has one special girl he absolutely adores ( “I’ve seen love affairs begin this quickly before, but not often,” she said!), his language skills blah blah blah, has a wonderful imagination, eats well, has adjusted well to the structure and directed play as opposed to the completely free play he was used to, is very sensitive and picks up on emotional states very quickly, helps set things up and clean them away, falls asleep at rest time within ten minutes and sleeps well, and so forth. If there’s one thing he has to work on it’s dressing and undressing himself. (Yes, we know, trust us. And we find it odd that out of all the things he could choose to rebel against, it’s pulling pants up and down and taking shoes off.) It took a week or so (and a new pair of shoes one size larger so that he can slip his feet in and out more easily) but he now puts them on and takes them off by himself, and even puts them away tidily by the door. I am always particularly amused when he carefully hangs his cap on the handle of his bedroom door.

He brought home ‘art’ his third day there: a piece of paper with bits of coloured construction paper from the scrap box glued all over it. “I made art!” he said, bursting through the front door. “Put it on my fridge!”

He sang selections from The Sound of Music in bed to me the other night, then patted my face and said “Sing with me, Mama!” So we sang ‘Do Re Mi,’ and ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ (I must learn all the proper words), and ‘Eidelweiss’. Singing in general has increased in frequency, accuracy, and volume. He’ll even sing for other people instead of clamming up when they notice. He tends to sing to himself when we’ve finished a story and our cuddle at bedtime, kissed him, tucked him in, and closed the door behind us. Putting him to bed at home has become much easier, and his midnight wakings have vanished. On average he wakes between six and six-thirty, which is right on time for school mornings.

He has lately been introduced to a 1996 BBC animation of The Wind in the Willows, and absolutely loves it. He has dubbed ‘Concerning Hobbits’ (of The Fellowship of the Ring score) “the Wind in the Willows music”. Sometimes he has an ice cream cone for dessert on the back porch after dinner, and he often brings a book out with him and asks one of us to read aloud while he sits on the deck and eats his treat. One night he asked if we’d read to him and I said that I had something new to share. I brought out my Ernest Shepard-illustrated copy of The Wind in the Willows and read the first half of the first chapter to him. He was spellbound. He has to be in a very quiet mood to listen to a chapter book like this, but we’ve managed to do it once or twice for a few pages so far.

The other film he is obsessed with is Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. We watched it in three or four sittings to make sure he didn’t get overwhelmed by the appearance and behaviour of the various spirits, and he has been asking lots of questions about spirits in general since. “Can you tell me about river spirits?” he asked me in bed one night. “Lots of things?” He plays at being a river spirit in the bath and listens to the soundtrack at night while falling asleep.

When we got the laptop back up and running he went into my office and pulled my chair over to the writing desk. “I’m working, Mama,” he called. I came in to the office to see him confidently tapping away on the keyboard. “What are you working on?” I asked. “I’m writing a message to you!” he said. So I opened Word for him, enlarged the font to something huge he could see very easily, and let him go to town.

Overall I see him growing into a confident and enthusiastic boy, wearing size nine shoes (size nine!), who converses clearly and plays complicated little games, who is ever more capable of handling increasingly complex tasks. The odd whiny/resistant period has almost vanished. I think we timed the preschool thing perfectly; he needed more structure and social-oriented activity than I could provide for him. When we were out shopping one day I heard him say, “quatre, cinq… quatre, cinq,” and I stood there in the middle of the grocery store aisle, staring down at him. “Are you… counting?” I said. “Yes, but there are no more,” he said, waving his hand at the empty space after the sequence of air fresheners he’d been counting. It’s like a miracle: we send him to school, and he comes home counting in French and singing songs I never taught him. It’s just incredible, after being the ones to teach him everything for a while. We love it. And so does he.

Weekend and Book Roundup

I am drinking the most excellent jasmine green tea this morning and feeling very happy about it. It’s Mighty Leaf Mountain Spring Jasmine, one of three remaining jasmine tea bags I’ve been hoarding from the huge sampler box ADZO gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It makes the morning very, very good indeed.

The weekend was lovely. There was the trip to the luthier on Saturday morning (see below for associated cello-squeeing), house tidying and general upkeep Saturday afternoon, a two-hour dinner prep and cooking Saturday night (in which I winged a roasted garlic-mushroom-onion-chicken thing that I served over pasta), the annual M&M birthday party Saturday night (at which we saw many many people, huzzah!), a trip to the Marche de l’ouest for fruits and vegs (we ate all the berries on the way home in the car, though, oops; but hey, it’s fruit) and then the bookstore on Sunday morning, groceries Sunday afternoon, and homemade pizza Sunday evening. The only thing I forgot to do was go to the bank to deposit a tax refund.

There’s been a lot of book reading lately. (Not that there isn’t usually, but it just seems more intense than usual.) I might be the only person I know of, or at least within three degrees of separation, who geeked out in absolute excitement over receiving my secondhand copy of the out-of-print Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525-1855. Gods bless Jane Baldauf-Berdes for writing exactly the book that I needed, fifteen years before I knew that I did. I devoured Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps and Last Days in an afternoon and evening, and will cheerfully lend them out to anyone looking for a decent and believable vampire story for teens. Ceri lent me her copy of Charles de Lint’s Dingo, which I also read in an hour in a half. I also finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma this weekend, and it was excellent. I looked for The Botany of Desire in the bookstore Sunday morning but of course it wasn’t in stock; if I’d wanted In Defense of Food I could have had one of twenty-three hardcover copies, but I wanted Botany. I don’t try to be difficult, really. (I also went with the intent of picking up Neal Stephenson’s new Anathem, couldn’t find it anywhere, was absolutely mystified at how they couldn’t have a single copy in stock when Stephenson is So Damn Big, then checked a terminal and discovered that it doesn’t come out in North America till Tuesday. Argh. Should have ordered the UK version that released on September 1 [obviously why I thought the NA edition was also out]; I could have had it finished by now.) Since they didn’t have the Pollan I wanted I picked up Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle instead, which has been on my to-read list since its release.

I read the boy the first half of the first chapter of The Wind in the Willows while he ate his after-dinner ice cream cone last night. I’m stunned that he sat still for twelve pages of text with only the occasional pen and ink sketch tucked among the words. I’m looking forward to sharing this with him, a few pages at a time.

Speaking of books, I have to reread the hearthcraft book today in preparation for drafting this weekend’s lecture. I suspect everything I’ll need for this hour-long intro-to will be in one particular chapter, prefaced by a quick definition of the subject and the importance of addressing home-based spirituality. The problem will be keeping it to an hour! Those of you who won’t be coming to Hamilton for this festival (and really, that’s 98% of my readers here) can assuage their trauma with the knowledge that this lecture will be a condensed version of the extended one I’ll be presenting next spring at the Avalon Centre, and most likely at Le Melange Magique as well, to celebrate the release of the hedge witch book.

Time for more jasmine tea, then it’s word-making. I think I’ll work on writing till noon, have lunch, then do a rough patch of the hearthcraft lecture from the bits in the book I want to focus on. Tomorrow I can add and remove things, make it pretty, then remove elaboration till all I have is a bulleted list of points to make and talk about. Okay, that won’t all happen tomorrow, but it will happen over the next couple of days. I’d do it from memory except I know that I wrote things down in the book that I won’t remember off the top of my head while drafting a lecture.

To work! And more jasmine tea!

Day One: Conclusion

Lunch out with Ceri was fabulous. We haven’t seen one another since my birthday, and that was for all of ten minutes. We chatted about so many different things: some writing (she asked what Orchestrated was about and I’ve never had to sum it up for anyone before…. other than the three-paragraph synopsis, that is), games and gaming, houses, her experiences at voice recording sessions for the game she scripted, her experiences at Comic-Con demoing the game, and her recent trip to Germany for more of the same. (Travel stories are much more interesting than my staying-at-home stories.) Then we went and petted all the gorgeous quilts on display in the shop next door.

Once home, I sat down and wrote a book review for an uncorrected proof I’ve read as part of the Mini Book Expo project. I’ll proof it and polish it tomorrow if necessary, then post it. I’m all set for freelance work tomorrow, and I may divide the day into half for someone else, half for my own writing. (Which is theoretical payoff in the future, as opposed to immediate income. But I’ve been over this countless times to make it All Okay in my brain already.)

The boys should be home soon. I’ll be making my homemade tomato-onion sauce for pasta tonight, with tomatoes, onions, and basil from the garden. No, they’re actually pulling in now, so in a few moments I should hear how the boy’s first full day at preschool went. I imagine I’ll hear about it while he’s still in the driveway, actually.

(Ah yes: there he is, telling the neighbours, “Hi! I was at school! I had fun!” And he evidently napped a decent while too. Excellent.)

Preschool: Day One

HRH asked for my moral support in dropping the boy off at preschool this morning. “This is my school, Dada,” the boy said as we pulled up in front of it. This is where I work.” HRH and I exchanged amused glances at this. Because if HRH ‘works’ at a school, the boy’s school must be where he will ‘work’. We had to call him back to take off his shoes, and back again for hugs and kisses goodbye, just like on Friday. “It’s harder for the parents,” the teacher said. “Are you kidding?” we said. “We love this!” The boy flew back through the entryway and out the door to dance in front of two new arrivals, shouting, “Hi! I’m here!” and then leaping back into the entryway, throwing his hand out to indicate the newcomers and say to us, “These are my friends!” He then darted away through the corridor to the classroom. “Oh, yeah,” the teacher said, “he’s so ready for this.”

HRH took me to school with him after dropping the boy off, and I saw his office for the first time and did the first half of his morning walkabout with him. The work rooms are huge and airy, with lots of windows. The weather was just lovely today, too; it really felt like the first day of school. Not too hot, sunny with a scattering of fluffy clouds, a good breeze. I walked the ten minutes to the metro station, which is set in a terminal that looks remarkably like a modern airport, and figured out the new ticket system. I thought I was buying a permanent card that gets loaded with money and debited as you pass checkpoints but I ended up with six paper cards that get fed through the turnstiles and stamped with dates and such. I smiled all the way home through two metro rides and a bus ride. It’s such an incredible day in all respects. I love feeling like this.

When I finally got home after the hour and a half commute, there was no mail, alas. I was hoping for my new glasses. Tried to return a couple of phone calls without success.

On the way home I read some of A Thousand Days in Venice and made a connection that had been lacking about the Poppy book, which has been in mothballs for a couple of years. I realised that I have to work my protagonist through her fear of travel. It’s the obvious and logical conclusion to the conflict and the story, and I evidently needed those two years away from the book to see that. I’d been trying to work another story thread through, thinking it was the main issue and therefore the focal conclusion, and it wasn’t working properly in my head. Paired with the other Revelation, this may mean a finished novel by the end of the year. If I focused only on it, that is. Which I will very likely not do, as I don’t think it’s as marketable as some of my YA stuff. Whatever. I have lots of time to work on writing now; I don’t have to pick and choose what to cram into a day or so. A good thing, really, because I’m feeling somewhat blissfully bemused at what to do first today.

Whirlwind = Exhausted

The boy officially begins preschool on Monday, but we’ve spent the last two days doing trial periods and acclimatising and mounds of paper-signing (government forms, sigh). He loves it, loves it so much he cried when it was time to leave on Thursday. His teacher is wonderful, and knew just what to do to help him: she offered the opportunity to borrow one of the school’s train cars. When he accepted and chose one they made up a little card together that had a drawing of the train and a sentence outlining the deal: Liam would borrow it overnight, take good care of it, and bring it back the next morning. Liam was so fascinated with the card that his attention was completely redirected and he left all smiles, looking forward to showing HRH the train he’d chosen. This morning he ran in and held the train out to his teacher with a huge grin, saying, “See, here it is, I brought it back for you!” Today he signed a book out of the library and promised to bring it back on Monday. He’s made new friends already, and his teacher has already remarked positively on his language skills (er, yeah, sorry about that), sharing, behaving well, and helping with clean-up. (Possibly because it’s a novelty with new toys and equipment. We’ll see.)

This morning after he’d given the train back to his teacher he practically ran in, heading for the classroom; I had to call him back into the cloakroom to take off his shoes, and then again so he could give me a kiss before I “left” (to go sit in the yard and read for two hours, but he didn’t know that). He loves it. Evidently the timing of a classroom environment is perfect. He’s already made friends who were thrilled to see him again this morning. I’m very proud of him. And very thankful to have found this wonderful place last spring, and to have been offered a spot for the upcoming school year, and that it’s all going so very smoothly for everyone involved.

What with all the sudden rushing about and handling of things that cropped up at the last minute as well as the normal running of the house I’ve managed to get absolutely no work done this week. I’ll make up for it next week, of course, because I’ve just realised that the boy is gone all five work days (there’s a grandma day and a day with the caregiver, too). Incredible.

Anyway, I’m headachy and exhausted, which is why I haven’t been at the computer very often since Monday (or I have been but haven’t been able to do much more than scan news and blogs and try to make sense of Facebook). Also, I have a new reading chair in my office which I’ve been using. I was looking forward to writing longhand in it, but the Clairefontaine notebooks I picked up yesterday don’t have plain lines; they have five slightly lighter lines in each regular ruled line as well as vertical ruled lines, and just looking at the density of lines on the page makes my eyes hurt. (Apparently it’s called French Rule.) So it’s back to the shop to return them this weekend. Yes, I’m an idiot for not opening the notebooks to double-check before I bought them. I was so thrilled to actually find the right size that I grabbed three while chasing after the boy. Lesson learned. No, I don’t know why I’m suddenly taken with the obsession to use Clairefontaine books. I have one A4 size that I bought years ago from a little corner store in NDG and I love how the pen travels across the paper and the size of the rule. I’ve become disenchanted with the little 5×8 hardcover notebooks I’ve used for years; I want something bigger, and I particularly want the brushed vellum paper so the ink from my fountain pens don’t bleed. And my subconscious has decided that this is what it Must Have to work on Orchestrated.

Wow. I have three hours before I have to leave, and nothing concretely scheduled with which to fill them. I may just go lie down and hope the headache goes away, with a bit of help from Advil. My work ethic tells me I should try to bang out some words in the book, but my health monitor is telling me that lying down would be better than trying to force things out at this point. Going to pick up the boy in an exhausted state helps no one.