Category Archives: The Boy

Seventeen Months Old!

This morning Liam was playing hard in the living room, and I noticed that it had been a whole hour since he’d gotten up. He still hadn’t had breakfast. I said, “Liam, would you like some cereal?”

“Cereal!” he exclaimed, and ran to take my hand and lead me into the kitchen. As I went I exchanged a startled look with HRH.

“Wow, that was really clear,” HRH said. “How long has he been saying that?”

“He hasn’t,” I said. “That was the first time.”

He’s linking more words together, too. The other day one of his books slipped off the chesterfield where he was reading it. “Uh-oh,” he said, looking up at us; “fell down.” “Uh-oh” has become a frequently-used saying. Sometimes he just wanders down the hall saying “Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh,” which is mildly amusing once you’ve gotten over the kneejerk “What’s happened?” reaction. In fact, Sandra Boynton’s Red Hat Green Hat board book is known in this house as the “uh-oh” book. Every time he looks at the turkey, who incorrectly wears the item of clothing the page features, he says “Uh-oh!” It’s hilarious. He also says “Wow!” a lot, sometimes caroling “Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow!” when something neat happens. “Door” is seeing a lot of use, as is “diaper”, and “shell” is tied with “coffee” for oddest new word this month. The other major new word he’s using is “clock”. He points them out all over the place.

Recently Liam has developed the habit of grabbing an adult’s hand to lead them somewhere, which is very sweet. The only problem with this develops when he tries to take both my and HRH’s hand while facing us, and then turn around to walk us in a different direction. His arms end up crossing over his head, or our arms get tangled up above him, which makes walking difficult for everyone involved! He’s also taken to dragging his bunny around behind him, sometimes hanging it upside down over his shoulders. Odd, but very cute. Sometimes he pulls the blanket out from his crib and walks around with that too, just in case he decides to lie down, I suppose. One likes to be prepared. (Perhaps this is why he hides crackers and raisins inside his little boxes, too. Come the singularity, we’ll all be sorry we didn’t set up food caches the way Liam has.)

Liam is currently obsessed with raisins, bananas, and applesauce, all of which he can ask for. “Cracker” is now crystal-clear. (He is also obsessed with the tea cosy, for some reason, and will grab it off the sideboard if he can. It amuses him.) When he eats, he usually makes what the Preston-Leblanc household calls “yummy noises”. “Mmm, mmm, mmm,” he’ll say expressively as he eats or drinks. It’s good to see someone enjoy their food so much. He pulled the container of tropical fruit juice out of the fridge the other day without either HRH or I noticing, and wandered away with it under his arm. Then he came back holding it out to us, frustrated because he couldn’t get the screw cap off. We laughed, then we got him a cup for it. He learned how to drink through a straw the other day when Arthur was over, which was really neat. And he eats like a small horse, so when he decides he’s not interested in finishing his meal — it’s rare, but it happens — we obsess for a bit over what might be wrong. But all that happens is he asks for extra milk and that’s that.

He finally figured out that the three cups he plays with in the bathtub stack together. Now he very carefully pulls them apart, watches them float in the bubbles for a while or tries to stuff ducks into them, then tries to put them back together. He gets them in the right order about half the time, too, which means that the other half of the time he tries to put a bigger one inside a smaller one, and looks very woeful when it doesn’t work.

Liam figured out how to open DVD cases a while ago, but now he’s figured out how to take the DVDs out. So all his DVDs are now in a multi-disc case up on a shelf, and the empty cases are on his shelf to play with — like a video store, as Julia pointed out the other day, where you take the empty case to the clerk and they give you the DVD. This is all well and good, but then he realised that our DVDs still have discs in them. Now our DVDs are all jammed as tightly as possibly into their shelves so he can’t pull them out, and what he does instead is run his fingers along the spines and look at the little pictures on them. He particularly loves the picture of Stitch on the Lilo & Stitch case, and the picture of Nemo on Finding Nemo. Speaking of which, we had to replace his toothbrush so I got him a Nemo brush, and he loves it. He loves getting his teeth brushed in general, which is a good thing. In fact, he loves it so much that sometimes if he gets his hands on his hairbrush, he tries to get it into his mouth after he brushes his hair. (We don’t let him handle his toothbrush for very long any more because after he pokes it around his teeth for a while he tries to brush his hair with it too, toothpaste and all.)

He has a new way of dancing. Instead of just bouncing in place, now he moves his feet in a little shuffle while smiling a huge smile. And he’s singing more now, too. “La la la la,” he’ll say in a little sing-song voice, especially if we’ve just sung something ourselves. And Liam’s becoming very good at bowing the cello; he keeps a nice weight on the arm, producing good tone. I do the fingering for him: it’s a cooperative effort. He keeps time very well too, but he only plays quarter notes in an andante four-four so far. I’ll get triplets out of him yet.

He is such a terrific kid. He’s so happy; he runs around singing and laughing, shares his food and toys, tries very hard to explain to us what he wants and gets cranky only as a last resort. He explores and asks questions and applies new skills all over the place to see what happens. He’s fun to be around. He’s definitely now down to one longer nap in the middle of the day, and he’s still sleeping a good twelve hours at night. When we cuddle in the chair before bedtime and he gets drowsy in my arms, I want to curl up in bed with him, my arms around him and his warm little body snuggled against mine. I’m looking forward to the time when his crib becomes the toddler bed so that I can snuggle with him for a while, because our bed isn’t a sleepy place for him as that’s where he comes sometimes to read books and play a bit on morning weekends before we officially get up. He’s a busy little guy, so long quiet snuggles don’t happen a lot. And quiet snuggles are different from the enthusiastic throwing of oneself at a parental figure. Both make the heart smile, but one makes you rejoice to see the life and love, and the other makes you count blessings as you touch pure peace.

Best-Laid Plans

I wasn’t going to write today; the boy was home all day, we had a playdate with Julia and Arthur (lots of fun, hurrah!), and I fully intended to go to bed with a book after dinner…

… but my brain had other ideas. So the novella now stands at 13,389 words, which means I wrote 2,215 more words than I intended to write tonight. Plus I have laid foundation for something interesting that will happen later on, and firmed up two other interesting things that will also happen later. There has been much development all around.

Now I will go make a warm cup of herbal tea, and go to bed with that book I meant to curl up with an hour and a half ago.

New Speakers!

Oh, my goodness. A subwoofer makes all the difference. These Vivaldi cello sonatas and concertos? Positively creamy. A dark cream, but creamy nonetheless.

Liam fell asleep in the car on the way home from shopping, and I managed to not only get him out of the car without waking him up, but inside the house, into his crib, and out of his jacket. I’m feeling pretty darn smug, let me tell you. Of course, he’s going to be ravenous when he eventually wakes up, because he fell asleep before he could have his lunch, but now I have the time to fix his sandwich and potatoes without the boy having a minor meltdown about how cruel I am to keep him waiting the five minutes it takes to prepare his meal. I’ll just keep them warm. And then after lunch it’s off to visit with his godparents!

As an antidote to all that feeling smartness, I feel dumb because I can’t collapse the new umbrella stroller we used. At all. I like to think it’s jammed, but I probably just can’t remember the correct combination of push-here bend-there it requires.

Rest

So here I am, at eight-thirty in the morning, a cup of tea at hand and the whole day ahead of me. HRH took Liam in to daycare this morning on his way into work and will pick him up again at the end of the day, leaving me the whole day with absolutely no responsibility. I’ve wandered through the house tidying up a bit, simply appreciating the feeling of not having to do anything right away.

Liam slept through the night, with no waking sounding as if he was a harbinger of the apocalypse. As a result he slept right through to 7.30, which wasn’t part of the plan: because his pattern has been wake around three-thirty for an hour/return to sleep/wake around five-thirty or six, we were relying on him to awaken early again. The sleep did everyone good, but it meant that we started the morning an hour and a half later than we expected to. Everyone was in such a good mood that it didn’t matter, though, and it was a gift for all three of us. It felt odd to kiss the boy goodbye and watch HRH bundle him into the car and drive away, when I’m usually the one corralling and transporting him, then running errands on the way home, writing immediately when I get in, and leaving just as I’m hitting my stride during my most productive time of the day in order to pick him up again.

I deserve this. I didn’t get the break I was hoping to have back at the beginning of August when the boy started part-time daycare, the break I needed after the sequence of “book interrupted by rush book/back to original book/early baby/finish original book/full-time baby/new book”. And I’m thankful to finally have this time, the time I need and have needed for so long, to rest in different ways and to reroot myself in life.

So naturally, now that I don’t have to, now that I have time to myself… I’m drifting here to write. It’s a different kind of writing, though; it’s relaxing, and feeds a different part of me. It’s restful writing.

To Bed

The new story, tentatively titled “Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro”, now stands at 2,186 words, which means I just wrote 1,286. This feels so wonderfully relaxed. I’m deeply enjoying writing for myself again.

I must stop because I have to get to bed, as the boy has been waking screaming around four in the morning — perhaps being so very little he senses the shifting Samhain energy even more than I do, poor thing, and needs some extra TLC to reassure him when he wakens (or, you know, it could be his teeth again, who can say?) — and I need as much rest as possible both to recover from the drain of the book and to catch up on what I didn’t get over the past three weeks. Besides, my characters have just sat in a circle to introduce themselves, so I need to figure out who the remaining seven are before I continue.

Good night, world. I’ll see you in the morning.

The Weekend Roundup

After a tense day of work and an ill HRH at home on Friday, once I’d put Liam to bed I went out to the YUL NaNo launch party. I’m at the point where I can’t relax in my own home again, and while I wasn’t exactly in a social mood I knew that staying home would be worse than going out. So out I went, and found parking right around the corner from Kit‘s house, which I chose to interpret as a good omen. On the stairs I was warned by excited friends who care deeply about my emotional and mental well-being that “Wow, there’s over forty people up there, and you only know about half a dozen of them!”, which helped prepare me for the moment when I reached the top of the staircase and walked into a solid wall of voices and warmth. As Ceri said, you could physically feel the creative vibe from the enthusiasm of forty-odd writers of all ages crammed into Kit’s living room, dining room, and kitchen. Kit made me a blessed cup of jasmine tea, and I made a point of meeting some new participants as well as saying hello to some veterans. (As I am chronically shy, this meeting of new people was a big thing. Except it wasn’t, which is odd in and of itself, and probably indicates to how tired I am: I couldn’t muster the energy to be freaked out.) I stayed for an hour and a half and then went home feeling very glad I’d attended. Of course, I slept horribly, but that’s par for the course this week.

Saturday was band, sans vocalist, which was actually beneficial because we all got to focus on music and hear the fine points of what goes on with the other instruments, which we can’t do when our vocalist sings because we listen to her instead. Afterwards, I went out to the big local hardware emporium with t! for lightbulbs and wooden planks and screwdrivers and such (and I got the wrong lightbulbs, damn it all), which led to an adventure in trying to pack the car with an eight-foot wooden board and a cello too, all in horrible weather. I was still in a decent mood, all up until the last five minutes of my drive home when idiot drivers trying to get onto the bridge blocked the intersection around the corner from my house. Funny how it only takes one thing to break the camel’s back. The day went veering madly downhill from there for no particular reason. I shut down so firmly that I don’t remember eating or doing anything at all on Saturday night. Oh no, wait; I watched Topsy-Turvy then went to bed. (Note that I did not say that I went to sleep. I think I was awake for a good three hours before I dropped off for a bit.)

Liam woke up insanely early Sunday morning and since I’m still sleeping horribly I was very grumpy about it. Once up, though, and breakfast eaten, I worked on the book, and late Sunday afternoon we all went over to Matthieu’s second birthday party! It was Liam’s first attendance at a birthday party not his own, and he was terrific. He got to play with TAZ and Zoe, whom he knows, and he saw Matthieu again, and played with lots of Matthieu’s toys that he just loved. He said “plss” for bread and cheese, and loved his taste of cake, and I could hardly believe he was as grounded and well-behaved and perky as he was, seeing as his schedule had been wonky all day what with the waking early and the time change. HRH’s choice of gift for Matthieu — a Superman hockey jersey — was a great success (as all the other gifts were! ah, the joy of a two-year-old and his new gifts), and it was really a wonderful party. It seemed to be perfectly balanced in regards to number of people, temperament, gifts, and food. I left this party extremely glad that I’d attended as well.

I managed to sleep more than five hours last night, glory be, and not wake up more than once during the night. Today’s been an okay day so far, although that may have a lot to do with the sun that’s actually visible for the first time in days. Liam woke up at a more decent hour, though his internal clock says he’s waking at the regular time and the time change means it’s earlier than it used to be. After getting dressed and playing in his room for a bit he said “door plss” when he wanted out into the rest of the house, as he had accidentally shut the door. Then he asked for “kssp plss!’, banging on the pantry, so he had a heaping bowl of Rice Krispies for breakfast, followed by applesauce. It’s been a good morning.

I’m going to stop for lunch now.