Category Archives: The Boy

Excellent Day All Around

Liam had an awesome day with his new caregiver! He napped longer over there than he usually does here, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it. I’m so glad to have found someone I know and trust to care for him while I work, and that they get along so well.

I managed to write a book outline complete with table of contents today, as well as handling all the correspondence I had to handle. (At least, I think so. I always forget something, usually something that’s been carried over and carried over for a couple of weeks, if not more.)

Have I forgotten to mention that the series I helped pitch as consultant has been accepted, and now they’re looking to finalise the first couple of titles? One of for which I wrote a proposal? Updates as events warrant.

In Which It Is The Beginning Of The Week, And Was That The Weekend?

Wow — a busy busy weekend. There was lots of ritual and energy work. I facilitated the last level 4 class on Saturday afternoon, and the students handled two very challenging energy exercises with grace and aplomb. On Sunday we conducted an elevation ritual for one of our coveners, and that went spectacularly well too, both in general and on the part of the covener, of whose demonstrated work and skills we are so very very proud. The weekend was busy in an everyday sort of way too. On Friday night Liam’s godparents brought dinner over to our place and watched Liam while I went out to pick up HRH from work. When we returned they’d pulled the table out and set it beautifully, so all we had to do was sit down and eat once Liam was in bed. We had a lovely relaxing evening; it was a real treat. There was even birthday cake, the candles on which my goddaughter helped me to blow out. Saturday morning was band, of course, which was cut short when the power went out due to the nasty storm that swept through the city. Being an acoustic-based band, we simply propped open the door and went merrily back to playing songs on our setlist in the dark, but the lack of fans circulating the air drove us out after about ten minutes, alas. Sunday morning saw us picking up new plexiglass to fill in the rest of the kitchen window above the air conditioner (yes, we’ve moved it from the bedroom to the kitchen to facilitate the circulation of the cool air through the living area) and a new air conditioning unit for the Baronial residence.

Now we all need a day to recover from the weekend. And I sort of have one! Yes, today is Liam’s first full day over at his home daycare! We are both very excited. There are friendly cats, excellent toys, a cool caregiver, a hamster and rats to look at, and a turtle. What more could a chipper and social and inquisitive little boy want?

The morning visit with the daycare last Friday morning went tremendously well. The only problem we ran into was the early afternoon nap, where he was just too excited to settle down for milk or sleep, so we headed for home. He ended up falling asleep in the car five minutes before we reached the house, and I foolishly unpacked him thinking he’d fall asleep again after nursing. He didn’t, of course, so that was the total of the afternoon nap, and on top of only forty minutes of nap time earlier that morning, too. Today, however, he has his playpen in which to nap, plus his Magic Rabbit nap buddy and the crocheted afghan his great-gran made for him to help him think of being asleep in his own bed at home. He’ll eventually nap once he plays himself out, despite being in an exciting new environment. So he’s in two days a week for now, which gives me time to get my current work done.

When we were over playing there on Friday, Liam did something mildly freaky. There are baskets of toys on the lower shelf of the playroom, and I thought I’d teach him something new. “Where’s the tiger, Liam?” I said from a few feet away. “Where’s the tiger?” He turned to look at the baskets of toys, and I figured that after asking him again I’d reach over and pick up the little plastic tiger and show it to him. But before I could he reached over and grabbed the tiger toy, then turned back to face me with a “Yeah, this is the tiger, so?” look on his face. “That’s right, that’s the tiger,” I said, and when he looked down to turn it over and over in his hands and examine it, I freaked out quietly at Prospero’s Daughter, because he’s only ever seen a minute or so of a tiger on one of his videos that we’ve played for him maybe four or five times in his life, and it’s not one of the words we’ve been teaching him. Part of me thinks it must be the group mind thing, because I was visualising that little tiger toy and its position pretty hard while I was talking to him. Very cool.

Liam is now narrating our car rides, which is quite entertaining. “Car. Car. Car,” he says, pointing out the window at the other vehicles on the highway as they pass. Every once in a while he says, “Truck,” pointing at a cube van or a semi. And he flirts with people at stoplights, giving them huge grins and talking away to them. The awesome thing is that most people smile back, and chat or wave through the window. Some parents move their vehicles a little forward or back so that their child in the back seat can see and wave at Liam too. While the majority of the time these days I think the population in general sucks, sometimes people can be pretty cool.

So this is my first grown-up day of work with the boy in daycare. I have a proposed table of contents to polish and send off to another editor, a bit of correspondence to handle, some developmental work to do, and laundry to keep doing. I already stopped off on the way home to pick up some new tank tops (although no capris, alas, which were also on my list) and a few groceries.

I should add “eating” to my to-do list, because I haven’t had any appetite over the past three days. It’s just been too dreadfully hot and humid, and eating in weather like this makes me feel ill.

More Birthday Goodness

I had a wonderfully low-key afternoon with ai731 yesterday. It’s truly astonishing how simply having someone else in the room with Liam and I reduces the stress, because with two pairs of adult eyes on him each doesn’t have to pay quite as much attention to every little thing he does, so I end up relaxing with him instead of monitoring him. It’s a nice change.

She also brought me a birthday present: a full colour print of the Invisible poster she did for a class project! It’s awesome! Now I can pin it up on my wall or my door and geek out ’cause they’re so cool.

I also got other birthday gifts last night from Scarlet and Blade: books (on music and mysticism and magical tools and women’s spiritual coming-of-age stuffs), plus dark Godiva chocolate and a beanie fox kit! I am thoroughly birthdayed.

And Tal is in the process of organising a birthday thing for me, which is very very nice, because it was starting to look like I wasn’t going to get a birthday thing at all this year (again). It’s ironic that all the years I didn’t want the attention on my birthday I and everyone else was free, but now that in recent years I’ve wanted to formally celebrate it, stuff keeps getting in the way and the event never quite happens. So yay for people you’ve known for almost two decades (yikes) stepping in and making sure you get what you want.

Today Liam meets Prospero’s Daughter (whose link I have misplaced, alas), and we all play for a bit. Hurrah!

Birthday Recap

I think the fourteenth month of Liam’s life is going to be referred to as the Month Of Alarming Lexical Leaps And Bounds. This morning he pointed to Cricket and said “Keh-cat.” Back at eleven months he started saying “Gee-cat” to Maggie-Cat, so this is evidently his new name for Cricket-Cat.

I had a quiet birthday. Liam and I took the bus to the mall where we bought a hand-held vacuum (not a birthday present to myself, simply something I’d been meaning to pick up for a while), and you would have thought the people on the bus, and the bus itself, existed simply to entertain Liam. I think early afternoon trips will become the rule rather than the exception, because he refused to nap after lunch and did rather well for the two hours we were out instead. He would have napped soundly once we’d gotten home, too, if I hadn’t turned the damn handheld on, expecting it to be quieter than our monster of an upright. It’s just as loud, so it woke the boy up after only ten minutes of napping. He proceeded to not go back to sleep, not with nursing, not with rocking, not with quiet time in the crib. Argh.

My birthday gift from Kino Kid was an evening of babysitting to allow HRH and I to go out and see Superman Returns. I had a coupon for free admission on my birthday as well as a ten dollar gift certificate to cover HRH’s ticket, so we ended up just paying for our snacks (and yikes, we do that so rarely that I’d forgotten how overpriced they are). The film was very good. I loved the design of it. I could have walked out completely satisfied after the opening credit sequence. And casting Frank Langella as Perry White was a stroke of genius.

Apart from my night outside the house, I got a book I’d wanted for a while (thank you, Jeff and Paze!), and flowers (thank you, HRH!), cheques from my parents and my grandmother (thank you!) and birthday greetings via phone and various online journals (thank you, everyone!). And if there’s a group gift in the works, would someone please tell HRH so that he can know if he’s allowed to go ahead and buy me the main gift that he wants to give me?

Today we have company this afternoon in the form of ai731. Then I think we’re going to invest in a second smaller air conditioner tonight so that we can have one in the front and one in the back of the house, because the humidex is going to push our temperatures above forty degrees this weekend. But my birthday money is my own, and some of it is going to go towards a new stick of RAM, because I’m tired of my computer thinking so hard when I open photo programs or have anything running simultaneously with Windows Media Player.

Sparky: Thirteen Months Old

This morning, the new word was “ilk” while showing me his bottle. Yikes. I’m going to start losing track of them all soon.

While nursing Liam this morning, I was thinking about what I was doing one year ago today. It was July 11 2005 when I carried my suitcase into the hospital to stay 48 hours on-site with Liam, so that the nurses could make sure we knew what to do with a baby, and to ensure that we wouldn’t break one another during full-time use. And I remembered being upset when Liam was hungry, trying to nurse in the middle of the night and crying his heart out, and we eventually figured out it was because I had too much milk for him to get a proper latch. Yes, we wouldn’t have this problem today, because the kid’s so enthusiastic he’d go through anything to get milk. But this is now; that was then, when he was a bare 4 lb 12 oz and I was producing an insane amount of milk because I’d been pumping for a month.

No, nursing is very different these days. I phased out the night pumping session about two months ago, and stopped the morning session at the end of June, as the bottles he gets now are few and far between and I still have a small freezer stash. He gets to nurse when winding down for a nap, and this past week he’s also been asking to nurse for five or ten minutes in the morning after he gets up and has played in the living room for a bit, even after he’s had half his cup of milk to drink on his own along with a snack of Cheerios. This past month he’s developed a tendency towards gymnastics when he nurses. He rolls around to get comfortable, tries to stand up, and basically squirms all over the place. This morning I finally sat him down on the chesterfield next to me, facing the back of it, and let him lean over a bit towards me to nurse that way. It seemed to work.

One of his favourite games is peekaboo (of course), and he never gets tired of it. When he decides to take a break from dinner he pulls the dish towel on his lap up and holds it over his face. Whereas before he’d pull it down again almost immediately and laugh, now he’ll wait a good long time while we wonder where he is before dropping the towel and grinning at us with that wonderful open-mouth grin he has. Not only does he hide his own face, he’ll reach forward and cover our faces, then pull the towel down and be delighted to see us. If we cover our faces with our hands, he’ll pull the hands away, then push them back to start the sequence over again. He tried to do it with Maggie, but she wasn’t interested in playing.

The obsession with putting small things into bigger things continues. The Fisher Price school bus makes an excellent Cheerio taxi, he has discovered. Food on the go. Snacks for busy babies and their toys. It’s the next big thing.

I mentioned the walking. The shelves have now become a climbing challenge. Liam will pile toys into his toy basket and step on them to get a better angle from which to reach the next shelf up. He’s also beginning to move furniture, if it’s light enough. He can move the coffee table, and the rocking chair. He also figured out how to open the glass doors beneath the television that house the electronics. We push the coffee table up against them, but now that he can move it when he sets his mind to it, who knows how long that will last? He loves opening the drawers in the kitchen and pulling my measuring cups and spoons out. The baking pans on the open bottom shelf are his toys too, as are the pot lids we keep in the stove drawer. It’s fascinating to watch him develop his own little games and ways of doing things. Not as fascinating is his recent exploration of high-volume screeching, just for the heck of it.

Bathtime is still awesome fun. He dunks his face in water at least twice a week. My in-laws had him dunking his feet in their pool last week, and he loved it. He had fun pulling handfuls of petals off the adjacent geraniums and tossing them into water to watch them float, too. ( “Thank goodness for skimmers,” said HRH.) At home he loves his sandbox, but he seems to have developed a dislike of the swing, which is unfortunate because we did get that swingset. It will still be there when he decides he likes swinging again.

His hair is long enough to start forming into little curls at the base of his neck. When he wakes up from a nap it’s in cowlicks all over his head, and I have to wet it to get it to lie flat. It’s so light and fine, with a brownish red sheen to it. A haircut is ages off, though, thank goodness. His eyes are now definitely dark green and I love them, because I was hoping he’d end up with green eyes. His naps are going well enough in that he still has them, but they’re getting shorter. Now the max is around an hour and a quarter. He’s still sleeping about ten to twelve hours at night, though. If I didn’t feel so dead at the end of his day I’d probably appreciate it even more.

I already journaled about one of the hand signs Liam makes. He has two others which are similar but separate. He waves at people and things to say hi or bye, sometimes with the associated word (sometimes even if they’re not arriving or departing!). He also has a similiar version of the point “more/give it to me” hand action, where he just opens and closes his fist in a direction, which means “that way” or “over there”. When I ask him where a specific toy is, such as “Where’s your bus?” he turns around and makes the sign at it. This morning I saw him put his palm to his mouth, hand flat, while he made eye contact with me, but I don’t know if he’s trying to blow kisses or tell me that he’s hungry. We’ll figure that one out within the next day or so.

As for food, he pretty much eats everything now. Pasta with meat sauce is very fun. He’ll eat a whole banana or pear or apple in one sitting as a snack, with a side serving of Cheerios or crackers and a good five ounces of beverage. He drinks milk, orange juice, apple juice, and water. He had steak with us again the other day at my in-laws’ house, and chewed on the bone, as well as nibbling some of my early birthday cake. (Chocolate! Yum!)

He’s got a place in a home daycare run by a woman I’ve seen care for a child over two years, and I’m excited about it. He’ll have so much fun! He’ll be starting with one day a week to ease into it (and give me that one day I need to get work done while my mother in law is out of town!), and then go to two so that I’ll have the time I’ll need to write whichever book gets contracted next. I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also a little sad, because I know that no matter how tired or annoyed I am at the end of a bad day with him, I’ll still miss him when he’s not here. It’s good to miss him, though, because it reminds me of how much I appreciate him. I don’t like being fed up at the end of a trying day, nor do I ever want to reach a point where I resent him because I haven’t been able to get my work done. I know there are millions of mothers who do the full-time at-home thing all over the world, and who’ve done it for aeons, but this is my family right here and now, our personalities, my son who loves people and likes constant interaction, and my work that I love doing. I think this flexible solution is ideal right now, with the option to keep him home if I like, or to ask if the caregiver can take him an extra day or afternoon if a deadline requires it. I don’t have to choose between my son or my job, and I’m thankful for that. I can have both, and it’s a blessing.

I love him. He’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. And I think he’s pretty darn lucky to have us as parents, too.