Category Archives: The Boy

More Sparky, With Cello

I haven’t even mentioned here that Sparky got a new cello.

It was about a month ago. When school began this year and lessons started up again, Sparky’s teacher mentioned that he’d grown over the summer. (This was not news to us; all the pants he’d had to roll up at the beginning of the calendar year were now just barely long enough for his legs.) Come the new year, she said, we’d have to look for a new cello, the next size up.

Let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane.

This was Sparky with the 1/4 size rental cello:

This was Sparky with a 1/8 size rental cello, the proper proportion for his size at the time (he was 5 1/2):

This was Sparky with his very own brand-new-to-him 1/8 size cello, the purchase of which was documented here). (It looks bigger than the other 1/8, but that’s just the angle of the photograph.):

Well, this was Sparky this past September, with that same 1/8 cello:

Yeah, we knew he was growing. We’d have been blind not to notice.

Because it’s not every day the right size cello pops up in the classifieds, I started watching local ads for a used one at an affordable price. There were 1/4 cellos out there for more than I could afford, of course. I needed to keep an eye on things and jump on the right one as soon as it was listed.

As fortune would have it, that cello showed up the second day I checked, priced at five hundred dollars. And it was five minutes away, to boot. So we made an appointment and went to check it out. It was perfect — nice sound, no cracks or open seams, a well-repaired neck — so I made another appointment to go back with the payment and to pick it up. The sound is quite nice; the simple fact that the body of the instrument is bigger means there’s more room for the sound to resonate and for the vibrations to amplify, so that’s a big help.

Sparky now had a new cello! Which meant we needed to sell his old one to recoup the money. I listed it at the same price, taking into account the three hundred dollars of work we’d had done to it to bring it up to playable state, the new bow we’d bought, and the new case. Two weeks ago I had a query on it, from a couple in Quebec City, who were looking for an instrument for their four-year-old son to start lessons with. (Aww!) It’s rare to find a 1/8 cello listed for resale, so I understand why they queried me; heck, we bought this one in Ottawa, remember? They obviously couldn’t come see it, but we had long chats on the phone and via e-mail about it, I answered a lot of questions for them, and we made a date for their son’s teacher to come see it the next time he visited Montreal. (He travels here to visit the same luthier we use! That was a good omen.) He came by this morning and gave it a good workout, then asked me if I was really asking only five hundred for it, because it was a really good little cello, and outfits usually go for much more. Yes, I explained, I only listed it at that price because we got a really good deal on it and I only added the amounts we’d paid for the bow and the case and the upgrades; I wanted it to go to another child who would love it and enable a family who might not otherwise be able to afford it to buy it. He said that he’d recommend it at that price without hesitation; heck, he’d recommend it at a higher price. So he called the couple who were interested, and they agreed, and we compromised on $475. Sparky’s first cello has gone to a very good home. And the teacher voluntarily promised to make sure it went to another good home when the current wee cellist outgrew it. And he took the wee cello away with him.

So, as HRH pointed out on the phone, through the magic of creative financing, we kind only paid $25 for Sparky’s new cello, which tickles me. I didn’t haggle with the woman selling the 1/4 because, as she said, it’s kind of a complicit thing: it’s like a closed community and we’re all supporting one another. It’s like passing good karma along, and encouraging our kids.

The only drawback is that the buyers wanted the small 1/10 bow we bought for Sparky when the 1/8 bow proved just a bit too long for him to balance properly. That’s understandable; the new wee cellist is four and a half, and he’s going to need a smaller bow, too. That means Sparky just started using the 1/4 bow we got with the newer cello, and you can tell he’s not quite comfortable with it yet. Although, our teacher told him he was doing all the right things to get used to it and that his hold was still pretty good for working with a new bow. And the case for the new cello doesn’t have backpack straps, which we miss a lot, but we’ll manage.

I don’t yet have a photo of him with it; he has refused each time I’ve asked. But we have a recital coming up in two weeks, so I’ll try to get one then. Or rather, I’ll have to ask someone else, because I’m accompanying him again!

I am a wee bit nostalgic, because Sparky got that 1/8 cello not long before Owlet was born, so we’ve had it as long as she’s been around.

A Night Out With Sparky

Last night Sparky and I did something special together, just we two cellists. We went to a concert held by the West Island Youth Symphony Orchestra, in the church where I usually do my Canada Day concerts.

It would have been little more special if half an hour before we got there, Sparky hadn’t done a 180 degree shift from his excitement prior to the actual concert and decided he didn’t want to be there, because we’d get home much too late to read a chapter before bedtime. He was cranky and a bit whiny through the first half. He sat there with a Lego book open on his lap, poking me and whispering stuff now and again. It was chilly in the church and he was wearing only a cotton button-down shirt, so that didn’t help; he burrowed into his down-filled jacket and pulled his scarf and hat on. But as every new piece began he asked for the programme and looked up its name. I like to talk to him about music, and sometimes give him snippets of trivia about the piece and the composer. He’s often receptive, but he wasn’t in the mood this time, so I let him be.

They opened with a Shostakovich overture that was nice and crashy with lots of brass, moved to Respighi’s Fountains of Rome (I need to break out my double disc set of Respighi music, because I do not listen to it enough), did a pleasant arrangement of Williams’ theme for Schindler’s List, and finished the first half with a soloist performing Chaminade’s Concertino for Flute and Orchestra. I was especially interested in this one, because our orchestra played it with a phenomenal young flutist a couple of years ago, but I’d never heard it live.

The orchestra was incredible. They were smooth, tight, confident, and leapt from pianissimo to fortissimo without dragging along the way. (My orchestra must make our conductor despair sometimes, because dynamics are one of our issues; he likes a lot of contrast, and we are usually very slow to get there.) We sat in the perfect place to see the celli work, and I was kind of excited about that. I think the last time I saw an orchestra play was about three years ago, and it was the WIYSO again, in their free concert for the Beaconsfield centennial year. (Again with Sparky! That’s one of the reasons I thought this would be a nice treat; we’d very much enjoyed that one.) It’s quite a treat to be able to sit and enjoy another orchestra.

The second half was what it’d really be looking forward to. They played Dvorak’s eighth symphony, and while the ninth is yes, very good, I prefer the eighth, hands down. The last time I saw the eighth done in concert, it was in the second half of an all-Dvorak programme presented by the TSO fifteen years ago; the first half was the Dvorak cello concerto with Yo-Yo Ma as the soloist, and Ma crept out in the second half to sit with the cellist at the last desk and play through the eighth symphony with them in the cello section for fun. The WIYSO did a brilliant job. The symphony is very cello-heavy; they have a lot of the themes and carry a lot of the textural richness along with the brass section, and they did a terrific job. It turned out that a lot of his grousing during the break was because he was tired, because Sparky slept through the second half, his head pillowed on my lap. I marvel at how he manages to sleep through the loudest, crashiest pieces of music. He’d whined through the break, wanting to go home, but I told him pleasantly yet firmly that we weren’t leaving because I wanted it hear the symphony, and so he could be miserable or try it make the best of it. I opened a tiny packet of Smarties during the second movement for him, and he went back to sleep for the rest of the symphony.

He said the next day at our group lesson that he’d really liked it, even though he slept through most of the second half. I know that even though there are hiccoughs along the way, he’ll remember these special nights. And yes, I read half a chapter to him after we got home, as I’d promised.

Halloween 2013

In pictures!

Owlet as Mei from Tonari no Totoro:

And Sparky as Commander Rex from Star Wars: The Clone Wars:

Sparky’s costume was made entirely by HRH out of cardboard (save for the mask, which was purchased, but ended up not being worn other than for pictures). It’s a really amazing construction of cardboard and velcro strips, Gorilla Glue and paint. Owlet’s costume was thrifted in its entirety, from three different stores. She looks even more cute with pigtails like the character wears, but since she leaves them in for about 0.78 seconds, we didn’t bother. (The crocheted Totoro was made by Ceri for Sparky’s third birthday.) While Sparky’s friends at school were appropriately cooled out by his costume, poor Owlet’s educator had no idea who Totoro was. This didn’t bother Owlet, of course; she knew who she was, and was very excited about it.

There was no way Owlet could wear her costume to actually go trick or treating, and covering it up with a snowsuit was pointless, so a few days before Halloween I brainstormed an alternate nighttime costume. She would be a snow fairy, in the pretty lavender princess-style winter coat I’d bought for her last year and stashed away, we’d find wings (thoughtfully purchased by the Preston-LeBlancs when they found a perfect and inexpensive pair on their travels), and I’d make a crown and wand out of found and dollar store materials. And that’s exactly what we did:

You can’t see it very clearly thanks to my blurry photo, but there’s a snowflake with ribbons velcroed to the centre of her wings, the same snowflake that’s wired to her dollar-store crown and her dowel-painted-silver wand. (This is pretty much the only time I’ve been pleased to see Christmas ornaments in the dollar store before Halloween. Six plastic sparkly snowflakes for a dollar? Yes please!).

It poured on Halloween, but it let up to a cold drizzle around trick or treating time. We drove out to spend the evening with HRH’s parents as usual, as their neighbourhood “does Halloween,” whereas ours pretty much does not. At this age, Sparky was scared of the spookily decorated houses and the kids in scary masks on the street, but Owlet chuckled at passing costumed people, stomped happily along the streets, and would have kept chugging along had we not called the evening on account of cold and wet and a forty-five minute drive home.

As much fun as it was, now Owlet knows what candy is, and asks for it frequently. All the way home we heard, “MORE TREATS! MORE CANDY!” from the back seat, and this after only four M&Ms on the way there, and half a Kinder Egg after supper before heading out. Now she gets one M&M after supper, and she thinks this moment is heaven. Otherwise, she’s pretty much forgotten that she collected candy in her bag, which was very very interesting while she was in the process of acquiring it.

And so another Halloween is over. I kind of miss costuming for myself. We’ll be able to do that again in, what, ten-ish years?

Mischief Managed

This past spring, when the new Pokemon game was announced for release this coming October and we learned that it was going to be made exclusively for the 3DS, I made a deal with Sparky. If, I said, he could save up half of the cost of the unit, we would pay the other half.

He has put every penny of his allowance into his piggy bank, put gift money in there, did extra chores around the house for money above and beyond his allowance for the usual chores he does, returned bottles and cans for the deposit money, and as of yesterday he had saved up just shy of his goal. As there was a good sale on this week, I said he’d just about done it, and so we made a date to pick it up this weekend. He would take any colour, he said, any at all; although purple was his first choice and black his second, he’d even take pink, he said earnestly. We assumed those were the only colours on sale, as they were the only three pictured in the ad.

The first store we went to was sold out and told us rather shortly that they had a limited quantity and if they were gone, they were gone. (Not only did this tick us off, because the ad had said nothing about limited quanities, it sent Sparky into a panic, despite having been told about rainchecks before we’d left.) The second store we went to had none left on the shelves, but when we asked, the clerk said she had one unit left behind the counter. It was red.

We are very, very proud of him. This was his first big test of will, saving up for something specific rather than just saving up money in general and then wandering through a store to see what he could buy with that amount. It wasn’t easy; there were several times that he pleaded to buy something, and I explained over and over that if he used some of the money in his bank he’d have to wait even longer for the 3DS. But he did it, and now he can start saving up for something else.

It’s charging up right now in its neat little cradle (oh, the agony of waiting another couple of hours!). He very proudly handed my DS back to me as we unpacked his new one. I think I’ll have find a secondhand Pokemon game so we can trade things back and forth and have battles. He’d love that.

I wish the photo of him beaming so hard that his teeth are bared and his eyes are squinched shut hadn’t turned out too blurry to use. You’ll just have to imagine the unbridled joy on his face instead.

School Again

Today was Sparky’s first half-day of school. He didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t eat very much this morning, and had worried himself into a low-grade temperature and chills. We dropped Owlet off at daycare half an hour early (more on that in a moment) and drove to school, parked, and joined the throngs of parents and children walking to the schoolyard together. There were about five hundred people milling about, meeting up with friends and awaiting the morning bell that announced the arrival of the teachers with their class list posters decorated to reflect their chosen themes for the year, which they taped up on the walls of the school building so the kids could crowd around and figure out who was in which class. The boys were thrilled to find three of the four who generally hang out together were in the same class. (I feel a bit sorry for the fourth, who was missing his first day and who will be without his mates in a different class tomorrow.)

It was interesting to watch how Sparky’s body language changed over the half-hour I was with him. He started off a bit huddled into himself, holding my hand now and again. When he saw people he knew he relaxed a bit, waving and saying hi oh, so casually, though he still held himself guardedly. And when he saw his very best school friend, he called out, and I could see his body open up and relax completely. He hung around with them, laughing and talking about Minecraft, and it was as if the summer hadn’t happened at all.

His teacher seems very nice. He told me with great excitement that there’s a book on Star Wars vehicles from Episode One in the class library. (Dear Mlle Sophie: You scored a win with that one.) They did a self-evaluation exercise where they were asked to write something they’d had trouble with last year on a small card, then fold it up and hand it in. Sparky wrote ‘math: subtraction,’ which I find interesting, because I’ve never seen him have a problem with that; his difficulty in math lies in mainly in thinking through word problems. He thinks his teacher will keep the cards and bring them out near the end of the year so they can see how far they’ve come. This is the first year of Cycle Two, and they do the first half of the year in French and the second half in English. (After this, I believe it’s just about 50/50 all year long through the rest of Cycle Two and Three.)

Owlet is in her fourth week of daycare, or “cool,” as she calls it. Day one was such a success that the only way I could lure her home was by promising her a bagel. (She has recently become obsessed with fresh bagels. This is both good and bad, as we liv around the corner from a bagel bakery.) The second day I dropped her off, I hung around talking to the educator. After a minute she pointed to the stairs and said, “Shoes. Stairs, Mummy.” The message was very clear: Shoo, lady, you’re cramping my style. When I picked her up that afternoon, we got in the door at home and she started to cry, “No, play more, play….” I comforted her and told her she’d go back to “cool” again tomorrow. “Oh kay,” she said, somewhat suspiciously and grudgingly, like I might be trying to fool her. Napping has been successful, they started potty training the second week they were there because everyone had settled so well, and in general everything is going so well that it’s like she’s been doing daycare all her life. There has been a teacher switch, however, because the educator who was initially slotted to handle this small private daycare (a satellite one to the main daycare the director runs) pulled out in the second week. Fortunately, the director was already talking to someone who had worked with her before, negotiating to bring her in as a swing teacher, and she just stepped in to be full time instead. Owlet loves her, and loves all her little friends there, and it’s only a bit odd to think that she has a social life outside our sphere of responsibility now. She brings home art, and talks randomly about her friends, and in general is thoroughly in love with “cool.”

It’s terrific that school and daycare are only four minutes apart by car in the same neighbourhood. My round trip takes about fifteen minutes, including drop-offs. And it’s a relief to be able to focus on work during the day, all the more so because I’ve been working on back-to-back projects, the last couple of them rush jobs.

Sparky’s Summer So Far


[ED NOTE on 19 AUG 2013: This was originally written two weeks ago. No, three, since it was when Sparky had just begun his second two-week session of camp, and he has been done with camp for a week. Sigh. In my own defence, I was working on a project that ate up all the time ever, because it needed tonnes of fact checking. (Not because things were wrong, I hasten to point out. Just because there were lots of real-world facts, and part of my job is to make sure the author hasn’t mixed things up or misremembered something, especially if those facts affect key plot points.) Anyway, that project is now done, and I will get a nice big cheque for it late next month.

So I’m backdating this instead of updating it. The update is basically that “Yay, Sparky adored camp, and I got to go to the last parents’ day with HRH while HRH’s parents stayed with Owlet, and then we took him out for ice cream. The end.”)]

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Sparky is in his second two-week session of day camp, and is loving it. We have impromptu little songs about, “Oooh, I love camp, I love camp, I’m going to camp” in the car on the ten-minute drive there in the morning.

At the end of each two-week session there’s a presentation for the parents on Friday afternoon. Each class has a fifteen-minute block in which to demonstrate their new skills or talk about what they did and learned in the class, and then the bell rings (they use a huge old-fashioned school handbell, and it has a glorious sound) and everyone moves to their next class. At the end, there’s a half-hour concert where the whole camp population sings whatever songs they’ve chosen to work on over the session in choir. As the parents’ afternoon takes place the very same time Owlet’s nap does, I stayed home this time and HRH went. He recorded a couple of Sparky’s demonstrations for me, though.

Sparky chose to do piano this summer as his music class at camp. He learned a two-hand scale and some finger exercises in the first two weeks. We were expecting him to play the scale for his presentation, which is what he told us he was doing, and that’s what he did. There was applause… but then he went right into something else, a simple piece that he played with both hands and read from the music on the piano in front of him. We were so excited. After only two weeks! He really, really enjoys piano, he says. I am slightly anxious, because I want to ask him if he likes it more than cello and would prefer to study it instead, but I don’t know if I want to hear the answer. On one hand, a local teacher for an instrument we didn’t need to lug around would be great. On the other hand, we’d have to prepay a season’s worth of lessons, and we don’t have that kind of available money. Our cello teacher asks for a month’s worth of lessons at a time. And cello is something that we do together, and he benefits from a parent who has a different understanding of the instrument than one who doesn’t play can offer. If he ends up doing Suzuki piano I will end up learning it with him, which is not a bad thing, but also perhaps one more thing I do not need on my plate right now. It is to be seriously ruminated upon, however.

The next thing HRH recorded for me was Sparky’s martial arts demonstration. They did different kicks and punches to break practice boards, which was fun, but the best part was the last bit. Sparky was first in the lineup for this one. The teacher braced, held out his hand with what looked like a pencil upright in it, and Sparky clapped his hands around the instructor’s hand and the pencil thing flipped away. When he was showing me, HRH was excited and said, “Did you see that? That was amazing!” It was filmed far away, so I couldn’t see any detail and had no idea why this was so fantastic. I had to ask a couple of times for it to be explained properly. Turns out the teacher was holding a practice knife, and Sparky hit the tendons in his wrist with one hand and the back of the instructor’s hand with the other, which forces the gripping hand to snap open in reflex. And he did it so well that the practice knife spun up and halfway across the room. So my kid knows the rudiments of disarming someone with a knife. Holy wow.

I finally finished his Gryffindor socks. He loves them, in case you can’t tell.

And since we’re talking about feet… he has worn through his fourth pair of shoes this year. School hasn’t even started yet.

He is very excited about water and pools these days. But he’s resisting actually trusting himself, the water, and the parent teaching him to swim, which is so argh-inducing from the parental POV that we’re pretty much at our wits’ end. It may be time to register him in lessons this fall, at an indoor civic pool. His French is good enough now, which was the main stumbling point before.

He’s currently in love with my Calvin and Hobbes books, and the Mutts collections as well. At least one goes with him everywhere. They’re getting a bit tattered, but since it’s from love, my rule about with keeping books pristine is somewhat relaxed.

Recent Excitement

1. We have a new kitten. She’s three months old, and it only took our big orange cat Gryffindor two days of suspicion before he started romping with her. His hisses were half-hearted, though. I think they were mostly for show.

Gryff has been clingy and needy since Cricket left us. He’s always been one of a multiple-cat household, and very social; he was miserable without another cat around. The original plan was to get another cat at the end of the summer, when Owlet turned two. Well, that plan was moved up for Gryff’s sake. Last Sunday afternoon we visited the city shelter, and came home with a wee brown and grey tabby. Meet Minerva (McGonagall, of course):

She’s zippy and so energetic that she may tire out both the kids and Gryff, now that he acknowledges that she exists in his own reality. The first evening, she raced laps in our bedroom, under the bed, up one side, running across under my knees, throwing herself off the other side, then repeating the whole thing. She’s three months old, is slim and tiny, and has wee kitten claws and wee kitten teeth. We put her carrier in a quiet part of the living room when we got her home, and I found Owlet pushing the straw of her water bottle and goldfish crackers in through the wire door to share with the kitten on two different occasions while we made supper.

We all had a really good feeling about this. We wouldn’t have brought her home otherwise, as disappointed as everyone would have been to come home kitten-less. We’re good at judging personalities and energy and estimating how they’ll fit into the energy of the family and house. Minerva was grounded, forthright and self-assured without being aggressive, and wasn’t afraid of the children. She fit in right away.

2. Sparky turned eight last Tuesday, and we celebrated his birthday this weekend en famille. My parents came in from out of town and HRH’s parents came over, too. The birthday boy requested cheeseburgers and ice cream cake for his birthday feast, which also doubled as our Father’s Day celebration, so that’s what we had for lunch on Sunday. He specified ice cream cake with an Oreo crust, a bottom layer of chocolate ice cream, and a top layer of peanut butter ice cream, so I made that Sunday morning. We had it with whipped cream and homemade hot fudge sauce, and it was really good. My mother, who does not eat desserts, had a slice and enjoyed it immensely, which was all I needed to know it was really good. (I knew everyone else would like it, and I’m glad they did. It’s just that Mum doesn’t eat desserts, so wow.)

3. Sunday afternoon Sparky and I had our end-of-year cello recital. Sparky played “Song of the Wind” extremely well, clearly, in tune, and in tempo. I had the pleasure of accompanying him again. I did a “Chanson Triste” that people thought was excellent, but I knew had been better in rehearsal. And then we played lots of good movie music as an ensemble, and we totally killed our teacher’s original four-cello-part arrangement of “Skyfall,” which we segued into after playing the James Bond theme. (I don’t know about the audience, but most of the students up on stage had goosebumps!) My teacher now has twenty students, so it made for a long afternoon, but it was good. It was great to have Marc M and Marc L in the audience, and both HRH’s parents and my parents this time; my parents haven’t heard me play for years.

My teacher is raising her lesson fees for the first time in ages next year, so it looks like I’ll have to stick to my biweekly schedule instead of returning to a weekly lesson. (Assuming I ever work again. It’s been six weeks since the publisher sent me a project. Feast or famine, that’s what this is, and I know it. Still, work would be nice, what with Owlet’s private daycare costs about to begin in August. Especially since the whole point in putting her into daycare was so that I could get work done without making myself sicker.)

4. The Tour de Fleece is coming up! This is a for-fun spinning event that runs concurrent with the Tour de France. I was so excited that I cleared my wheels two weeks ago, which was kind of a dumb move. So I’m doing my vanilla spinning now to get it out of the way and fill my time before the TdF begins at the end of June. I’ve got an undyed BFL and BFL/silk blend going on my Symphony to ply with a bobbin of dyed BFL/silk I’ve already spun, and I’m doing some longdraw singles from heathered plum roving on my Baynes Colonial to get used to woollen spinning on it.

5. It’s the last week of school for Sparky. (We got next year’s supply and fee lists today, and I’m having trouble parsing the fact that he’ll be in grade three in September.) He has a final birthday party coming up next Sunday for five friends. Then after that it’s the Canada Day concert, two weeks off for everyone, and then day camp begins for Sparky. I’ve made it through the past two weeks; I just need to make it through the next couple.