Category Archives: The Boy

Random Liam Stuff

I’m feeling slightly apprehensive, because today is the first day the boy has gone to daycare in underpants. As of Friday morning we went off pull-ups. There were several accidents on Friday morning but only one Friday afternoon, two on Saturday, and only one on Sunday. He’s been lazy and depending on the pull-ups-just-in-case too much; now he can’t, and he’s realizing it. We’ve also dropped the ever-present sippy cup, which has helped the step to big-boy underwear. We offer him a drink regularly, and if he wants one otherwise he asks for one and he gets it in a real glass. I foresee accidents now and again for the next little while when he gets distracted, but accidents happen, and he helps clean them up. We still use a diaper at night, although it’s only a little damp in the morning; he sleeps very soundly, and I think having him feel secure during the day should be the first goal.

Late Friday afternoon we visited a preschool. We’ve been looking for one for a while, because Liam’s at the point in his development where he could really benefit from a structured class-like environment. Despite the several messages left with preschools and older daycares over the past three months, however, not one of them has called us back. HRH finally got a referral from his office mate to one on the south shore (we’re not sure why we didn’t think of looking near the college where he works, but it’s ideal) and we checked it out at an informal open house. From the moment we walked in the feeling was right. Liam evidently felt so too, because he seamlessly merged into the kids there while we toured and talked and got to know the educator. We love the layout, the program, and the philosophies demonstrated by the educators and assistants. The boy didn’t want to leave after our hour there, even though the other kids had left, which was also a good sign! The educator told us frankly that we were at the top of her list, because she wrenched her shoulder last season and would prefer to take an older child who doesn’t need to be carried; Liam fits right into the proper age range she’s looking for, and she shares the same good feeling about him and us. It’s nice when instinct and intuition support the otherwise observable facts.

So suddenly our little boy seems very grown up: real underwear, real cups, and school. “We’re going to see a school? A school for me?” he said with delight and excitement when we told him about the open house. That and the seamless merge into the environment and activities seem to support our ready-for-preschool theory.

And a final amusing anecdote to balance the grown-up-ness: Lately we’ve been listening to the Muppet albums in the car. The boy has now taken to mumbling “Ow, ow, ow, ow, owwwww” as he walks along. I first heard it the other day and said, “Liam, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?” He looked at me uncomprehendingly. Then I realised that we’d just been listening to Marvin Suggs and the amazing Muppaphone in the car, and the boy was echoing ‘Lady of Spain’ as he took each step, but without the actual note attached to the sound the Muppets make when they’re whacked.

A Sudden Abundance Of Live Music, And Thoughts Deriving From It

I’m tired, but there are things worthy of noting.

Invisible completely and totally rocked the house on Friday night, with a double set and a terrific cohesive sound. Every one of them keeps getting better and better. There was much dancing, and I don’t normally dance. There was much singing as well, and I hope I didn’t drive Jan too crazy with it. It was terrific to see people I haven’t seen in forever, too. Also, I had a very good margarita. “You really seemed to be enjoying yourself,” HRH said on the way home. “I think it’s important to obviously demonstrate to a performer that you appreciate what they’re doing,” I said. “There’s nothing worse than being on stage and seeing a sea of dead expressions in front of you, applause or not.” Sure, I could have sat there unmoving and enjoyed myself just as much, but the music was good and it moved and what the guys were doing on stage for us moved me.

Did I miss being on stage? Yes. But not enough to throw myself back into band. I miss the times when it was going well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go well most of the time. I miss it when we’re actually making music, not talking about unrelated things or wasting time. I certainly don’t miss the amount of energy that went into it. Or rather, I prefer to have that energy to put into other things, like living my day to day life (thank you so very much, FMS). I’d like to get back into band someday. Someday is not soon, however. We’ll all be different people somewhere down the line and that will make a positive difference as well. I’d like to explore other kinds of music in a small ensemble too, at some point, with different people.

The evening before I enjoyed Marc’s vocal recital, presented by all his teacher’s students. (Live music two nights in a row! I don’t think I’m greedy, just starved for culture.) There were about half a dozen of them and they all sang three songs, ranging from Broadway to pop to chamber songs and opera arias. It was great, and I saw a handful of the people who I would see again the next night, but in an even more relaxed atmosphere. We kibbutzed outside for an hour after the show was over, and that was just as wonderful as the recital itself, in a different way. I took a moment to look around both on Thursday and Friday night, and saw people with whom I’d stayed in touch for fifteen to twenty years as well as those I’d met within the last ten or so. I really miss my friends, and it was felt really, really good to be with them.

There’s this quirk that I have: My eyes tear up suddenly when I’m really enjoying something musical. It doesn’t mean I’m particularly sad or happy or overcome by what the music is communicating. It actually has more to do with appreciating the fact that the performer is offering something, similar to what I outlined above. Marc was the first one up at the recital, a position that carries a lot of responsibility, and he sang “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady. About a third of the way through the first verse I had that tearing-up response, and I thought about what was happening. I was experiencing a surge of emotion, not as a response to the music but a response to what Marc was doing: he was reaching out to his listeners and offering them something, and I was moved by it. It seems to be an empathic response. It’s not in response to the words, or the music itself. It’s in response to the performer. It does have an emotional connection, of course, but it’s not primarily an emotional reaction.

This happens when I imagine performing myself. It doesn’t happen while I’m actually performing (or it does, but extremely rarely); rather, it happens when I visualise performing certain pieces of music. I have a very strong ability to visualise, and I invest a lot of emotion into it. It’s one of the ways I practise when I can’t be at my instrument. I’m also very good at imagining several different lines of music simultaneously, including my own line. (I think this is one of the reasons why I love working in an orchestral setting so much, and also one of the reasons why I get frustrated very easily in small ensembles without a coach; it’s hard for real performers to live up to what’s happening in my head.) In these cases, my response seems to be connected to the visualisation of the joint act of the performers in the ensemble reaching out to the audience. And this too may be one of the reasons I was dissatisfied with band: I very rarely felt that reaching out-ness happening, or a sense of the audience being moved by what we were offering. There was a lot of struggle that never felt like it resolved or settled into an actual delivery of something.

I’ve thought about this response a lot, and I still can’t quite put it into the right words. There’s something about the simultaneous identification with the performer as well as being an audience too, but I can’t pin it down yet. There’s also something about receiving and returning energy, which I know I’ve talked about before in lectures and discussion and very likely at some point in this journal as well.

I don’t have the opportunity to experience live music as an audience member very much, so this past week has been extremely precious to me. I’m very proud of everyone who performed, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I hope they all know that. And I hope that somehow I managed to communicate that I appreciated what they offered.

Monday

I worked all weekend. Saturday morning we went out and about for a bit, but I worked in the afternoon, chasing the end of an idea for the new YA novel and setting things up for the MS review. Yesterday was eight hours of freelance MS review, and I’ll be finished it by the end of today. Then I can turn to changing the hearthcraft book as per orders.

It’s Victoria Day and a holiday here in Canada, so HRH is home. I’m thankful because it gives me a day to work and I don’t have to pay a caregiver. The weather is rainy and cold, which is unfortunate. HRH and the boy went off to the EcoMuseum this morning but I’ve just had a call telling me that it’s pouring out there so they’re heading to an indoor playground instead. I made pretzels this morning and have already finished my second one. I need to have quick and easy food available to me in the mornings, and the granola bars I make to see me through the week disappear in a day or so, eaten as snacks. There’s a new loaf of bread rising too. Over the weekend HRH reset the vegetable bed, tilled our compost into it, and planted peas, corn, carrots, and onions. I forgot about getting seed potatoes, so maybe next year. There’s corn and sunflowers strewn along the side of the house too. We’ll see what happens. All my herbs are coming back, and we’re going to get peppers and lettuce and maybe some cucumbers. We always end up with one or two leftover tomato plants from other people, and I’m the only one who eats them in the house so there’s no point in planting our own.

One year ago today was the live dual-band gig. The year off has been good. I do miss playing, but I only miss the parts where it was going well. I don’t think anyone misses the time eaten up by rehearsals and travelling to rehearsals and home practice. Even if we’d been in the headspace to keep going, various health issues, work commitments, and plain old timetable incompatibility on everyone’s part would have forced us to go on hiatus anyhow. All those things logically preclude a reunion at this time. I am very much looking forward to being at Invisible’s upcoming show and not having to worry about conserving my voice or energy for our own performance.

Unless something miraculous happens (like an anonymous money order for fifteen hundred dollars arriving in my mailbox) I’m not going to have the new 7/8 cello in time for the Canada Day concert. I’m disappointed, but I’ll live. I suspect it will have been sold by the time I can buy it this summer, so I may not have one at all until this fall. I wonder if a home trial of this one is even worth it. I’m glum about it, because it was pretty much the one thing keeping me upbeat about things this past month.

Right. To work.

Work Of A Sort

I spent the day researching and looking for images to help inspire me for the YA orchestra novel idea. I alternated between that and writing a 2000 word essay for an anthology I was invited to submit to.

I’m late on the boy’s 35 month post; that was mostly drafted too, but half my photos are on the other hard drive and I hadn’t gotten around to backing them up to the external drive when the hardware failed. I think it’s going to be scant on photos this time around.

And a third random thing: The colour of the 7/8 cello is somewhat like the one of this page, only it’s shinier with a few more amber-caramel tones to it.

Off to get the boy.

Thirty-Five Months Old!

The countdown to three years is officially on!

We are firmly entrenched in the time of “No, I can do it myself!” He insists on pushing shopping carts, strollers, wagons, and anything else he can get his hands on. He vacuums and sweeps, refusing help even when he’s struggling. When we shop at Metro we let him take one of the tiny kid-sized grocery carts and he pushes it around very importantly, putting things in the basket, and then unloading them onto the conveyor belt for the cashier. I spend a lot of my time diverting the cart from crashing into shelves because he looks at the displays and not the aisle ahead of him, or catching it as it falls over when he tries to make too sharp a turn. It is terribly sweet to see how proud he is when he handles it all it, though, and it amuses other shoppers too.

He is also very helpful when we drive. “Green!” he exclaims as soon as a traffic light changes. If I’m not careful he will bounce into the front seat when I get out of the car and say, “I’m driving!” When we start out for wherever we’re headed, he will make his request for whatever music he wants to listen to that day, and then very often shout “Make it louder!” with much glee. Sometimes he listens to whatever classical music I have in the CD player instead of asking for his music to be played, and now and again remarks, “I like this, it’s pretty.”

“It’s big, and huge!” he said excitedly the other day as he was telling us a story. He uses words neither of us remember teaching him — feature, silo, treatment, airflow, aileron — and unless he’s speaking too fast he can be understood by just about anyone. His letter recognition has just skyrocketed (thank you, TMBG — this learning leap brought to you by the letter F for fridge, upon which are the letter magnets) which is kind of dizzying, because suddenly we’re fielding letter questions again, only this time they’re tests of our own knowledge.

Something I’ve never mentioned is that he sleeps with BunBun over his face. I know he’s settling down for the night when he stops chattering and telling a disjointed review of his day to his toys and books and curls up on his side, pulling the stuffed rabbit over his face. Lately he’s been wanting me to curl up with him so he can fall asleep holding my hand, which is fine. I’m not seeing it as a problem, as he falls asleep perfectly normally on his own everywhere else. He’s also taken to inviting BunBun along on outings, and sometimes cradles him across his lap in the car. “This is my baby,” he informed me the other day. “He is hungry. Can he have a graham cracker?” And he solemnly held the cracker to BunBun’s mouth, and then asked for his sippy cup of milk and fed that to BunBun too.

Most of the time if the weather’s nice we take the wagon to the bus stop to meet HRH on his way home from work. Liam now pulls the wagon– or pushes it, depending on his stubborn preschool mood, which engenders resistance when I try to hold the handle to steer the thing. “No, don’t help,” he insists, and stomps his feet in frustration when I explain that someone has to steer or he’ll crash. Or, you know, run over my feet. Again.

He spent much of our Mother’s Day visit to HRH’s parents running around the front lawn, turning over the ornamental rocks in the garden to look for bugs underneath them. He found an ant nursery, which suddenly began boiling over with furious ants shoving little eggs around in the sudden blinding sunlight, and was glued to the sight until we literally dragged him away and replaced the rock over the poor things. When he got tired of turning rocks over he ran up and down the front slope, looping around the pine trees, shouting, “I’m running! I’m running! I’m running around a conifer! C is for conifer! T is for tree!” His favourite DVDs right now, you see, are They Might Be Giants’ Here Come the 1 2 3s and Here Come the A B Cs. Favourite songs include BNL’s ‘7 8 9’, and TMBG’s ‘Seven’, ‘Nine Bowls of Soup’, and ‘Triops Has Three Eyes’, all of which he can be heard singing at various times. He is also fond of ‘Five’ as sung by Robin on The Muppet Show.

He has taken to disguising himself in the bath by scooping up a handful of bubbles and plastering them to his chin, then saying in a deep muffled voice, “Where’s Liam?” which is hilarious to play along with. He has also taken to frequently pretending to be a cat, saying “Meow!” in response to whatever I ask him, and curling up in my lap and leaning against my shoulder. It’s fine by me; I take the opportunity to put my arms around him and stroke his back, and murmur to my Liam-Kitten. His sense of humour is developing nicely. On the other hand, so is the little-boy fascination with Destruction as played out by Toy Cars and Trains. And finally, the enthusiasm for dinosaurs has kicked in. I was beginning to wonder if it ever would.

Recently he was playing with the cardboard tube from a paper towel roll while I made dinner. “Oh, hi,” he said, holding it up to his ear while looking at me. “Hi,” I said back. “I have to go to orchestra now,” he said. I figured out that the tube was a phone and said, “Oh, really?” “Yes,” he said, “you can wave at me through the window.” “Have fun!” I said. “Okay, bye,” he said and ran off, then came back into the kitchen without the tube and said somewhat sheepishly, “I need my cello now?”

He has also discovered painting with tempera and nice big thick paintbrushes! When he gets going he paints in a gleeful frenzy and then cries out, “More paper!” I whip the finished painting away, place a blank piece down in its place, and away he goes again. He is having great fun discovering what happens when he mixes colours together, and what shapes he can make with different strokes of the brush or thumping the bristles down on the paper in various ways. He’s into art, letters, and music; no surprise, I’m sure. But he also loves tossing balls around, playing “sockey” (which is what he calls both soccer and hockey), and riding the trike. It makes for a lot of fun these days.

More Liam posts this past month:

The trip to the EcoMuseum, where Liam loses his cap
The resolution of the hat drama
Liam discovers the library
Liam helps feed the baby squirrels

Grateful

Thank you, life, for a lovely relaxed day with no stress. Played lots of cello, finished another book, picked up a few groceries, lay on my stomach with the boy to watch the ants in the backyard, ate strawberries together in the sun, took the wagon to meet HRH at the bus stop, had barbecued burgers for dinner, curled up with the boy and cuddled him until he fell asleep holding my hand.

I am so very thankful for a good day. Another bad one would have been… well, cumulatively Very Bad.

And now, I am going to go run a hot bath with either honeysuckle bubbles or lavender honey milk powder, and read the new issue of Strings magazine that arrived today.