Category Archives: The Boy

Revenge of the Argh: In Which She Gnashes About Traffic

Feel free to move along; I’m whinging. Most local people were probably affected by these same problems.

Liam and I spent a total of six hours in the car yesterday, most of it not going very fast at all. The only time we spent at home was the forty-five minute wind-down to a two-hour nap.

We wanted the car yesterday so that we could go visit the Preston-LeBlancs, and HRH had a reno job out in west Kirkland. So we drove him out, then drove back through traffic into the city for our (now-brief by necessity) visit, then went home for the nap (2-4 PM). Then, at 4:20, we left to go pick HRH up. What should have taken twenty minutes took an hour and fifteen minutes. And then it took three hours to get home. We pulled off and had cheeseburgers at 6:00, and it was a good plan, too, because if we’d waited till we got home at 8:20 PM Liam would have been ballistic. As it was, a half-hour off the road in Harvey’s was a huge adventure for Liam, and fun for us too as we watched him enjoy his first eat-in burger experience. And this ludicrous travel time was clocked taking the Lakeshore to avoid the horrifying traffic on the eastbound 20 that was backed up to the Dorval Circle.

We were at a loss to explain the traffic everywhere, in all directions. There was snow falling, sure, but it was nothing compared to what had fallen before. There were no obvious accidents; the roads were mostly clear-ish of snow and all lanes were open. (Although looking it up in the news, there were a couple of accidents that affected the eastern parts of the highway system, which may have affected the volume of traffic further west.) We kept as calm as possible; there was no point in blowing up. But we were tired, and achy, and bored, and irritated, and there was a two and a half year old in the back seat who couldn’t understand that we couldn’t just “ready, set, GO!” when he commanded us to, or why there was no more milk, or no more crackers, or why he couldn’t get out of the seat to curl up with someone. We pretended it was a relaxed drive to look at the Christmas lights along the river.

So, the plan for Thursday has been redacted: Liam and I are staying home instead of shopping, because otherwise we’d have to drop HRH off again and there’s no way we’re battling theoretical traffic there and back twice. This means HRH and I have to shoehorn everything in on Friday morning after dropping the boy at his grandma’s, and before HRH goes to the office holiday party. We’ve reassigned the essential gift-buying so that everything comes from two stores, which simplifies matters somewhat. I have a couple of little things for Liam tucked away in my office cupboard for rainy days, so those will be his gifts; with the things he’s getting from grandparents he’ll never know we didn’t get him something more substantial. He’s still young enough that we can get away with it.

I received an e-mail from the accounting staffperson I spoke with yesterday, confirming that my cheque had been written and sent out this morning. That was pleasant news. Depending on the volume of holiday mail I may even get it Friday, or Monday. And today’s mail yielded a surprise cheque from my dear grandmother, as well as a little parcel for Liam.

I hate being this behind on gifts and general Christmas preparation. I like to be done weeks before the insanity hits.

Kissmas: Gearing Up, Counting Down

Saturday: Santa.

“Did he cry?” Sandman7 asked when I saw him that night. “Yes,” I said, “when it was time to leave Santa’s lap.” (I suspect Sparky may not be quite clear on the telling Santa what you want in order for him to deliver it on Christmas Eve thing. It’s possible that he expected Santa to hand him a new train right there and then. The ball he got was appreciated, but it wasn’t a train.) Then he fell asleep in the car on the way home, and woke up when we tried to carry him in without waking him. And he didn’t nap at all, other than those five minutes.

Saturday evening I went out to dinner with not one but two fabulously talented, witty, and suave men. Sandman7, Talyesin and I went out for a special dinner at a local steakhouse and had a lovely, lovely meal with delicious wine. I have not had such a wonderful meal or night out in, er, longer than I can count.

Sunday: Tree.

Wait, no; first it was two hours of shovelling. Then we went out to get the tree. In the blizzard, yes, because if we didn’t do it Sunday morning, it wouldn’t get done. It was frigid. The boy had great fun trotting around the lot saying, “Ooh, look, Kissmas trees! Look at all the Kissmas trees! Look at them all!”, tears streaming from his eyes from the wind, his little button nose bright red. We put the tree inside the car to take it home, as tying it on top of the car would have made driving even more dangerous in the gusts of wind and lack of visibility due to blowing snow than it already was, and he held one of the branches all the way back. I remember that he did the same thing last year. (The tree-buying experience couldn’t be more different, however; last year we were looking at a green Christmas. This year, well, there’s a metre of snow in the backyard already, from fence to shining fence.)

We put the tree in the front entryway, and rearranged the living room. Then HRH shovelled for another two hours.

Then the damned stand broke when we tried to put the tree up, postponing the actual assembly of tree and decorating till some undetermined point later in the week. The tree was put on the back porch to collect piles of snow overnight.

Then HRH went out and shovelled for another two hours.

This morning the blizzard had passed and the sun rose and the world was white and sparkling and a sea of snowdrifts. HRH went out and shovelled for yet another two hours (I know, it’s repetitious, but so is the work), and all the neighbours banded together and helped one another uncover cars lost in snow drifts and to clear the piles of snow left by the ploughs. It’s so fabulous to see people actually helping one another instead of taking snow clearing for granted.

After dropping the boy off at his caregiver’s this morning, we bought a new snow shovel and tree stand to replace the broken ones (yes, bad things to have happen to one around blizzard time — and when HRH fought his way through the storm to arrive at the doors of Canadian Tire just as someone was coming up to close them yesterday, he was told he’d had eight hours to get what he needed and they weren’t letting him in. Was I not just expressing astonishment at the lack of civility among the retail workers this season?). The tree is now inside, in the new stand and the boughs are falling into place properly. I suppose we’ll decorate it tonight.

HRH is off doing a snow fence for someone today, and I’m finishing up the YA edits and printing it out, come what may.

ETA: Environment Canada says that we got 30 cm of snow yesterday, and that the record for December 16 is 41.2 cm. We’ve had 78 cm so far this month, and the record is 118.1 centimetres in 1972, so we’re two-thirds of the way there.

Strike One

So, that doctor’s appointment today?

It didn’t exactly happen.

Yes, we made a sixty-kilometre round trip for Liam to cheerfully play in the waiting room, voluntarily pull a chair over to the doctor’s desk in her office, and play happily with a set of Russian stacking dolls while she asked me about his food intake and sleep patterns. She uses a big exercise ball as an office chair, and when she went out of the room to take a call Liam rolled it around and bounced it and chortled. When she returned and asked him to come over to the other side of the room so she could start the examination, however, Liam suddenly backed into the corner of the office, slid down to crouch on the floor, and cried. Big, berry-like tears squeezed out of the eyes, and pitiful “no, no, no, no”s came between the sobs. He kept asking to go back to the car. He was miserable.

I am informed that this is very normal for children his age, as they are developing a sense of personal space. The doctor even told me that it’s a good thing, as it’s a form of self-defence. As he’s always been fine with our GP I can only surmise that the sudden refusal to go along with the appointment was probably a combination of that developing sense of personal space and the new, unfamiliar office location. He was happy all morning, repeating “going to the doctor’s house, going to the doctor’s house, see doctor!” over and over. But he asked to be carried down the stairs to the office, which is indicative of needing a bit of reassurance, and came back to me often while he explored.

We have another appointment scheduled for three weeks from now. In the meantime, we have been instructed to buy him a toy doctor’s kit and for us all to play with it a lot to accustom him to the instruments and how they’re used. (I foresee Bun-Bun being a patient in the coming weeks.) The doctor also said that it might take a couple of ‘play dates’ with her before he lets her actually do the examination. She was so unfazed by it that it must happen more often than I think.

Halfway home in the car, he asked to hold my hand. I reached back to give it to him, and he held it all the way home as long as I didn’t need it to shift gears. Five minutes away from the house he said, “I have a hug?” I promised him a big cuddle when we got home, as we were both strapped into our seats. He had a quiet lunch while watching some Beatrix Potter, but then it took over an hour to get him to nap.

On the bright side, in his exploration of the new office he found the scale and weighed himself. And it looks like yes, he’s 33 pounds, unless he’s 34; the needle was vibrating a bit, because no two and a half year old can ever, ever stand still. He is officially one-third my weight.

We’ll try again the first week of January.

Thirty Months Old!

As he grows older these updates are becoming very hard to do in the way I used to do them, so I’m making it easier on myself just noting things down and doing a kind of photo album instead: fewer deep observations, tighter prose. I miss the slightly more emotional tone, but I just can’t capture it the same way as he ages. I think it has something to do with how he’s becoming more and more of his own person. He moves me just as deeply, but in ways that are harder to define in a monthly post. I’ll also link posts I’ve done throughout the month with Liam-associated milestones or observations for reference.

So, here we go.

Liam no longer walks to the car; he ‘walks in a snow!’. And when the world is so very white and so very fluffy, one cannot blame him for recategorizing the snow along the way as more important than getting in the car to go wherever we’re going. He keeps trying to pick up chunks of snow on the driveway, to bring them into the car or into the house, whichever way it is that we’re heading. Fortunately the chunks have always self-destructed before he reaches his destination, so we haven’t yet had to have the talk about the ephemeral nature of snowballs. He is very solicitous of my safety outside too: “Careful, Mama, it slippy,” he tells me with very precise delivery. He is fascinated with snowplows and snow removal vehicles (but then, who isn’t?). And he keeps wanting to eat handfuls of snow, which wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t trying to pick it up off the driveway.

Lately he has jumping about like a mad thing, and both feet leave the ground. This is a great improvement over the jumping motion with the body, knees bent and all, but without the departure of soles from floor as he did a few months ago when he started ‘jumping’. Last month one foot got off the ground; now both feet do. Liam jumps about ‘like a kangaroo!’ with immense enthusiasm. His co-ordination is improving daily, probably due to the challenge of moving about in snow gear. He goes up and down stairs with ever more confidence, and improves at climbing in and out of the car daily. He can whip a kitchen chair over to the counter and handle things on the surface a bit too well now for comfort. And he brushes his teeth on his own remarkably well, although HRH still needs to do a quick follow-up to make sure everything is clean.

When he trips or accidentally whacks his hand against a doorframe or some such thing, he wails — no tears, just the wails — then kisses his hand or his own knee and keeps on going. Mother-makes-it-better kisses are already being phased out. Soon I will be redundant. Also, I am no longer allowed to dance or move in any kind of rhythmic fashion when music is playing. I should have seen it coming when I was forbidden to sing.

His new favourite film is The Cat Returns. Current favourite books include Ten Apples Up On Top! (for which he insists on having an apple to balance in his head, then eats it while reading the other books before bed), The Tale of Tom Kitten, and The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Liam counts things incessantly: orange slices, the ducks in the bath, stairs, chicken nuggets… We’re hearing the use of ‘mine’ and ‘my’ a lot all of a sudden. The need to classify things as belonging to someone has become very important. “That my cat,” he says of Maggie, “that my chair, that my kitchen, that my mama, that my dada; that Mama’s book, that Dada’s boots.” Also frequently heard is the exclamation of “OH NO! ROBOTS!”, which kills me every time, especially when he’s playing with his trains. Evidently robots are the antagonists of choice in Liam’s play world. The other new saying is “Let me be!”, used when we try to get him dressed or up and moving when he’s doing something.

Firsts this month include dinner at an adult friends’ house with no other children, during which he behaved himself well (thank you, Ceri and Scott), and the introduction to the joys of a ball pit (for which we thank you again, ADZO).

He got a pair of new boots last week. He’s wearing size 3X to 4 tops, size 7.5 to 8 shoes, and size 3 pants now. He’s sleeping ten to eleven hours at night, and has on average a two-hour nap in the afternoon. Liam has his two and a half year old appointment with the doctor at her new location on Thursday, so we’ll have formal measurement of weight and height and so forth then. We know he’s over thirty pounds, and guess he’s around 33. I’ll update this post with the particulars when I’ve got them.

Pertinent posts about Liam this past month:

First day of playing in significant snowfall, and dinner with Ceri and Scott
Liam tries to pluralize
Liam requests a song of Mama
Kissmas and spontaneous expressions of love

And now… more photos!

And the thoughtful/serene/peaceful photo to wrap it all up:

Weekend Roundup

A respectable weekend, marred only by the bad decision to go out grocery shopping Sunday morning. I really hate people who don’t think beyond themselves while in a public place. I hate people who hover behind me in shop aisles glaring at my back when I pause to take something off a shelf even more. And I hate that I get tense and get snappy with HRH because of it, as he’s the one who pushes the cart when we all go out together. We couldn’t get out fast enough.

Aside from this, we had a great Saturday afternoon out at the ADZO household, where we reconnected with lots of people we don’t see often enough, ate so much delicious food that our hosts just kept putting out on the counter in front of us, enjoyed a very nice red wine and a surprisingly good honey brown beer, and gawked at the number of kids running around. (They almost equal our numbers. If two or three more come along, that’s it; our generation is history.) Liam discovered the joys of the ball pit, an inflatable wading pool filled with balls in which he played with great enthusiasm, working himself up to the point where he’d take a running start from the kitchen and launch himself into it head-first, chortling all the way.

The Christmas lights went up on the front of the house Saturday morning, thank goodness, so there’s a least a touch of Yule around the house. Liam helped me wrap the banister of the indoor staircase with garland too, although it seems more sparse than it was last year for some reason. On the list of things to pick up this week once there have been paycheques are a couple of wreaths (one for my office door and one for the front porch railing) and a good indoor garland to loop above the front window, as well as some candles and good ribbon. We can’t get our tree till the weekend, but when we do I’ll be looking for one that’s a bit bigger than we need (not hard, as HRH always enthusiastically reaches for one that’s taller than the room can really handle) so we can cut lots of boughs off the bottom to use as further decorations. We often use the stump that we trim off the tree as a symbolic Yule log, too.

Sunday afternoon, the postal truck delivered the first box of the season, from my parents (which surprised me completely — Sunday delivery already?). It contained a tin of sugar cookies theoretically addressed to Liam, two books for me to read, a box of Lady Grey tea, and the most adorable apron for Liam to wear while we bake.

For once, the weekend didn’t feel rushed. And this is HRH’s last full week at the college; next week is private reno work, and the first couple of weeks of January are free. A real vacation! Hurrah!

And last but quite certainly not least, last Thursday Liam and I went out to get him a pair of new boots, as the ones he had fit him but didn’t come high enough to keep snow out of them. (His test to see if they fit and worked? Jumping in them like a kangaroo, then stomping around like an elephant.) While we were out I did my usual quick look around for the DS game I’d worked on in the spring that was released last month, and I finally found one on a shelf. I brought it home, popped it into the DS, and had fun actually playing through the first couple of games the team had been working the bugs out of while I’d been doing contract work for them. And then I called up the credits for the thrill of seeing certain names I knew were there. (HRH and I are the sort of people who sit through credits at films, too; it’s important for us to show appreciation and respect for all the people who have put time and effort into something. Even now I get a thrill of seeing friends’ names scroll by at the end of Saturday morning cartoons, knowing so many who have done and still do storyboards, layouts, character and location designs.) And then, to my utter astonishment, my own name scrolled by. They’ve credited me as part of the linguistics team, right after the main linguist who helped develop the project. I felt like someone had just taken all the oxygen out of the room. This was unexpected, as I was a contractor who wasn’t on permanent staff; as a freelancer brought in to tweak [ED: Oh, all right, HRH, how’s ‘manage’?] the word database I hadn’t any expectation of actually being credited as an official team member in any respect. This was a completely different kind of thrill from opening a box full of author’s copies of a new book I’ve written, or seeing my books on a bookstore shelf. I don’t know if I can put my finger on why, other than the shock of the unexpected. It was fun, too.

I just spent a quarter-hour doing a phone survey on federal issues such as security, the Afghanistan mission, and the RCMP. If there had been an option to answer “I run after a two and a half year old all week so any news goes in one ear and out the other”, I would have selected it three-quarters of the time.

Today is okay so far. I worked out some numbers: if I write 1,666 words each of the three days a week I work, I will have 60K done in three months. That brings me to mid-March. And I’ve already got 10K down, so we can readjust that to about 1,300 every work day. Not that it’s going to change my regular goal of 1,600 anyway; that number is so deeply ingrained into my work mind that it’s the default quota no matter what. So it looks like two and a half months of 1,600-word work days, giving me a half-month to tweak things. (And cut words out, which is always the problem by that point; I go over the total target because there’s so much to fit into such a small space.)

And now, back to work.

Thinking It Through

I wasn’t there, but reliable sources say this exchange happened last night while reading Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse at bedtime:

BOY: Mouse.

HRH: Yes.

BOY: [LOOKS AT NEXT PICTURE] Mices. Two mices.

HRH: Almost! When there’s just one, it’s a mouse. When there are two, they’re called mice.

BOY: Two mice.

HRH: Yup.

[NEXT PAGE]

BOY: One mouse… two mice.

HRH told me that it was incredible to sit there and watch Liam recognise that there should be a collective term for several of one kind of thing, and extrapolate it from a word he’d heard us use. “Language development is so mind-blowing,” he said. “I am so the wrong person to be teaching him this.” Which isn’t true, of course, but points to how overwhelming it can be to observe a small creature learn like this.

They’re putting up reindeer, And singing songs of joy and peace…

Not dead, just run-off-my-feet busy. I haven’t sat down at the computer in days.

Over the last twenty-four hours there has been lots of snow. Official reports vary, but according to our backyard we’re looking at around eighteen inches. It’s stopped, but we’re due to get about fourteen more centimetres tomorrow. (How very Canadian: Imperial and Metric describing accumulation in the same paragraph.)

The boy stayed home today and HRH took the car in to work after spending an hour and a half shovelling the driveway. For those who have inquired, no, HRH did not get the snow day that most elementary and high schools got. CEGEPs don’t close unless something traumatic has occurred on campus. He’s out there shovelling again now.

This morning I wrestled the boy into his snowpants (“No, no , no Mama, no snowpants”) and coat and hat and mitts and boots and scarf, and myself in tights under jeans and legwarmers over that (a lucky and unexpected find in the winter accessories box) and my old snow coat, and opened the back door for him. Liam was decidedly unimpressed with this deep snow thing. He kept falling over and flailing in a swim-like fashion, then rolling over on his back to look up at me and say, “Help, Mama, I am stuck” in that funny precise way he has of speaking. We fell over in the backyard for half an hour before coming in and shedding piles of snow-covered clothing on the kitchen floor and drinking hot chocolate. Like me, he thinks the hot chocolate is the best part. I am all about the apres-ski.

Friday night I went to a cello quartet concert with someone from orchestra, and it was absolutely phenomenal. It was one of those evenings where I was reminded of why I chose the instrument I did, and also mildly despair-inducing in that it made me feel that it was completely useless to even try because I can never play like they can. (Granted, they all had at least two music degrees each and played in pro symphonies. But still.) I really appreciated the evening, because not only was it the first time I’d attended a live music performance since May, but it was at my orchestral colleague’s invitation to share her double pass. It was great to have a night out with someone I don’t know very well but with whom I have things in common. I thoroughly enjoyed her company.

Late Saturday afternoon we went out to have dinner with Ceri and Scott, and this marked the first official Taking Liam Out To Dinner at a Friends’ House With No Other Kids. We all had a fabulous time. Liam was very well-behaved apart from the not-at-all-subtle exploring of rooms and the joyous chasing of cats, who mostly (meaning any cat who was not Tybalt) didn’t seem to mind and even let him pick them up and carry them around (I don’t know who was the most surprised when he walked in holding Miho). He ate surprisingly well, too, which I hadn’t expected, although it was hard not to enjoy the food as the meal was one of the best I’ve had in a while. (Liam seems to have decided peas in a pod are the current vegetable to be defined as Dalishious, replacing the chopped and frozen parsley he had dubbed Dalishious a few days previous.) I made a chocolate espresso pecan pie for dessert, which immediately made my Make This Again and Often list when we tasted it. We all had so much fun that we didn’t check the time until eight o’clock, at which point HRH and I scooped the child up and fled, expecting disastrous things to ensue with his schedule. Going to bed two hours later than usual didn’t seem to completely mess him up: there were no mid-night wakings, I got him back to sleep when he woke up at 5:15 the next morning with minimal fuss, we all got another two hours of sleep, and the only other effect seems to have been the boy being slightly whiny over the past two days. Not something we want to do on a regular basis, of course, but we’re very impressed at how he handled it. We wish we could have stayed longer, of course.

I spent a lot of the weekend baking, because Sunday was a cookie-exchange day. Bearing ten dozen oatmeal cookies, I spent a lovely afternoon with friends and acquaintances and snuggled with Tallis while chatting with some other mums. Liam cried a lot over the weekend when he’d try to scoop a cookie off the cooling rack and was told he wasn’t allowed because they weren’t ours, but the delight on his face when I unloaded all the new cookies once I’d come home from the party was proof that the cookie-denial was all forgiven. (Besides, he’d already stolen four of mine from the first batch out of the oven. It wasn’t like I didn’t let him have any at all.)

I like to wait as long as possible before breaking out the Christmas albums, but after watching the however many feet of snow fall today I put on Holly Cole’s Baby, It’s Cold Outside, Diana Krall’s Christmas Songs, and Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong while making supper.

I have piles of e-mail to handle, but that will get done tomorrow morning.

It was a very long day. I’m going to turn out the light now.