Category Archives: The Boy

Eleven Months Old

Last year at this time, I was packing the library/office/dining room in the old apartment, Solitary Wicca for Life had just been listed on the Amazon sites for preorder, and there were 40K words in the green witch manuscript. It’s amazing what changes a year can bring.

The changes that Liam’s undergoing are so extreme sometimes that you can see the difference from one day to the next. He can stand for a few seconds before thumping down on the floor or grabbing a tabletop again. It seems to be a case of simply forgetting to hold onto something until his balance shifts. We don’t have stairs so he hasn’t really had an opportunity to learn how to go up or down them, but he did manage to get himself up the single step in the ADZO sunken playroom the other day.

The language thing proceeds apace. He’s very good at echoing the number of syllables when you say a word to him. A couple of times he’s seen Maggie and said, “Gee-ca”, which I can only assume is his approximation of Maggie-Cat. And I nearly fell off the chesterfield one day when he was watching one of his educational videos: a child’s drawing of a cat came up on the screen, the narrator said “cat”, and Liam said “cat” right back to the TV. He can say “Hi” to people regularly now, and we’re hearing “hi cat” or “hi Da” a lot more, because these are the phrases we say to him. “Look, there’s the cat. Hi cat!” we’ll say, and he’ll say it too.

He eats so well. He loves to feed himself toast and Cheerios and crackers, although he’s not as excited about handling slices of steamed vegetables. My heart nearly burst the day he was munching a rice rusk and held it up against my lips so that I could nibble it too. I did, and he went back to munching it. No big thing, just a casual “Here Mama, you can have some too.” Why is it so moving when a baby shares food? Is it because it’s sustenance, something we couldn’t live without, and so to have someone offer to share it so openly and innocently touches us on some deep instinctive level? He’s held his teething ring out for me to gnaw on too, and he finds it very amusing for some reason when I nibble the plastic rings. Now he tries to feed toast to his stuffed turtle as well as trying to share his toys with it. He’s tried to share toast with Maggie too (of course). And in the car I’ve seen him hold crackers out to his Noah’s Ark dangly toy that hangs from the window. As for nursing, he’s sort of self-weaning: he’s just too busy to settle down and nurse during the day, so apart from the usual bottle in the morning when he wakes up, we give him his milk in a sippy cup during playtime, and a bottle around two or three in the afternoon. He usually has a pre-bedtime nursing session too.

Liam’s currently fascinated with wheels. He hangs out the side of the stroller to watch the wheels go around, and if we’re walking with another child in a stroller or wagon he keeps a close eye on those wheels as well. At the park the ground where we picnic is slightly uneven, so he can usually sit next to the stroller and spin one of the front sets of wheels that aren’t fully touching the ground. The other day we pulled the stroller up to the car, and he reached out to touch the car tire as we unlocked the back door for him. Then he got very upset when we tried to lift him out of the stroller to put him in his car seat. No, he wanted to see the wheel, and as we didn’t have anywhere to be right away we let him feel it all over, the hubcap and the tread of the tire itself, until he was satisfied. Well, mostly satisfied; we didn’t let him chew on it the way he wanted to.

He’s figured out that it’s the cello bow that makes the sound on the strings, so it now interests him just as much as the strings do. He grabs at it when I play, trying to move it over the strings himself to make scratchy noises. We bought him a xylophone/piano thing the other day and he alternates between bashing the xylophone part with his hand (not the piano part yet, for some reason, and not with the mallets provided) and turning it upside down to hit the bottom of it.

We can see his sense of humour developing as he gets older. Liam loves to pretend he’s sneezing. He’ll look at you, grin, and say “ah… ahh.. ahh…”. Sometimes he’ll just wait like that, a mischevous look in his eye, until you finish the sequence by saying “CHOO!” and he laughs and laughs. Other times he’ll just do a sedate little “Ah-choo” of his own, then grin like a fool. Along with the sense of humour is the development of the temper as he futher understands what he wants. For example, if he sees HRH walk through the back door, he’ll crawl over and bang on it to follow. Sometimes he gets very angry if he isn’t allowed to do so, or if we take something away from him that he shouldn’t have, and he lets us know in no uncertain terms. It’s usually remedied by saying, “You can’t play with that, but you can play with this instead” and handing him another toy to replace whatever he wasn’t supposed to be handling.

He loves the park. He loves to swing; the first time I pushed him he began to giggle so hard that he gave himself the hiccups within seconds. Now when we go to the park we swing for a while till he decides he’s done, then we picnic on a blanket and have fruit and water and crackers, and he watches the older kids play with huge eyes and a half-smile.

The no nap/ twenty minute nap/ multiple night wakings have mostly melted away over a period of four days. Now he’s back to sleeping through the night, and he has two glorious hour and a half naps per day, sometimes with a short catnap late in the afternoon. Unfortunately over the past couple of days with this cold, he’s back down to short catnaps instead of long naps (or not napping at all, sigh), but there are four or five of them so the total nap time is equivalent to his two longer naps. And the multiple night wakings haven’t returned (knock on wood). Of course, the cold may be messing the new routine up more permanently than temporarily, so we’ll see how things settle once it’s over.

Today he went for another research observation, this one at the Concordia psych department where they had him watch video sequences of animals moving versus furniture moving, and then watch a robot puppet show where the robot directed its attention to one toy or another repeatedly. So that makes four projects in which he’s participated. I find his development and learning so interesting that talking to people doing research on how infants and toddlers react to information, or how they learn and apply skills fascinates me.

We’re on our last chapter of the first year baby books. In thirty-one days he’ll be a year old. That’s just astonishing. I suppose we’ll have to get to organising a party, yes?

And since he’s eleven months old, the Liam: Ten Months Old photo abum is up! Enjoy it.

Sniffly Boy

Well, it’s official: Liam has his first cold. He was sneezing yesterday, and today his nose is running. The good thing is that he finds sneezing hilarious. On the not so good side he’s mildly cranky. He’s spending a lot of time crawling into my lap to be held, and pulling at my shirt to indicate that he wants to nurse. Since he’d pretty much dropped daytime nursing on his own, I’m assuming it’s because it comforts him and it provides fluids, so I’m not complaining. Naps are going haywire again, however, because he can’t breathe very well. And we know exactly where he got it (hi TAZ!), which is reassuring, so we know precisely what to expect. I’d rather he be infected through playing with a friend whom we know is sick than pick goodness knows what up from goodness knows who.

Part of me is relieved that he’s finally caught something, and part of me is wishing he could have hit one year old before breaking his healthy streak. Just ’cause.

To distract him from how miserable he was feeling after lunch, we spent fifteen minutes playing in the sunny back yard, where he ate dirt (of course), petted the grass (which needs to be cut, so naturally our mower requires fixing), and pulled the heads off dandelions, which made him giggle for some reason. Speaking of playing outside, does anyone local need waterproof sunblock? We bought some Coppertone SPF 45 baby sunblock, not realising that it was the white stuff that sits on top of the skin, and Liam immediately tried to lick it off because he could see it. I picked up some sunblock that gets absorbed instead, which is what I wanted in the first place, but now we have a large bottle of the other stuff that we won’t be using. It’s expensive, so I’d rather it go to someone who will use it than have it just sit in a cupboard here.

Sunday

We spent a fabulous afternoon with the ADZO family yesterday. They fed us, which was unexpected but not unwelcome because they always create wonderful food, and Liam got to play with TAZ and her toys, and in general we all got to relax and share good company. It was remarkable to see Liam interacting with someone who is seven months older than he is; we can see how advanced he is in some respects, and the areas in which he’s definitely an eleven-month-old. He had an excellent nap in the morning and one in the early afternoon, and those allowed him to be sociable all afternoon and let us stay till past six o’clock. When we got home, he had some milk and passed out for twelve hours, with no wakings.

(Yes, we’re rather happy about it as well. Plus he went down for all naps and bedtime without a fuss. Two days of stress seem to have smoothed things over. Cross your fingers.)

We got to share in a first at the park: TAZ climbed the stairs to the slide, sat down at the top, then pushed off and slid down all by herself for the very first time. Liam’s first was much less impressive, but something to celebrate nonetheless: he climbed up the single stair from the sunken playroom into the dining room all by himself. And it looked at one point like he was playing peek-a-boo with TAZ across the wooden chest, because he was trying to mirror her actions of bending down behind it to hide and standing up to reveal herself.

Liam also consumed the most Cheerios I’ve ever seen him stuff into his mouth over dinner. Of course, a lot of them ended up in the seat of the high chair, but he ate tons of them despite that.

Once Liam’s morning and afternoon naps are solid (and they seem to be settling in well) I’ll be able to count on two blocks of an hour to an hour and a half of work per day. Oh: and Mousme is writing a swan story based on the Bonny Swans folk ballad too! I am very amused, and also very excited. I opened my Swan Sister file the other day, but not a single word was added because of the Invisible mp3s on the playlist. It was all good, though, because I played the cello instead, and Liam woke up fifteen minutes later, so I would have just been settling into the writing flow when I’d have had to stop.

I’ve been invited to a local BNI meeting in a couple of weeks, so I have to overhaul my business cards and recreate my handout literature. It’s interesting that this invitation came from someone whom I’ve never met (HRH has spoken to her on the phone once), who thought of me off the top of her head, and at a time when I’m ready to start taking a couple of freelance jobs on again. I’m looking forward to it.

‘Not What We Give, But What We Share’

Thank you, thank you, thank you everyone who came out to the potluck BBQ t!-and-ai731-are-getting-married party last night. Tal, HRH and I truly appreciate your time and energy. The food was wonderful, and the company most excellent. I’m only sorry that I missed a lot of the party due to sitting in the baby’s room trying to get him to/back to sleep, or sitting in my bedroom next to the monitor so that I could hear him if he woke up yet again. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the guests who wandered in over the course of the evening to hang out with me and bring me drinks and lemon buns. (At one point the entire membership of Invisible was in my bedroom with me, save for the bassist. Of course, the bassist has been in other bedrooms of mine plenty of times, and besides, it was his own getting-married-party going on in the other rooms.)

Ironically enough, Liam woke up at eleven once everyone was gone. Go figure. Maybe it was the cessation of white noise. But apart from the initial rocky two hours of very-hard-to-get-him-to-sleep, he only woke up at eleven and again at five-thirty, each time for about fifteen minutes for soothing, then another five or ten minutes of grumpy complaining alone before falling asleep. That’s an improvement already.

We now have a plethora of hot dog buns in the fridge. No hot dogs, but plenty of buns.

HRH picked up a new barbecue yesterday morning in honour of the event, as we realised that there were between twenty and thirty RSVPs and there was no way that our mini camp BBQ was going to handle that kind of dinner traffic. We’ve been wanting a full-size one for some time, of course, and we found a really great one on sale for just under one hundred dollars, down from its usual price of one-forty-ish. Hurrah!

We also had a wedding rehearsal yesterday, and it’s going to be wonderful. t! poked gentle fun at me for getting choked up when I read one of my lines, but I think I have every right to get teary because it’s one of the lines he read at my own wedding six and a half years ago. The circle is now complete. Or something like that.

Band practice Saturday morning confirmed that the wedding gig will be more of the non-stress event we want it to be. We’ve temporarily removed two of our songs from the set in order to rework and polish them some more before reintroducing them in the fall.

Today: a lovely social afternoon with the ADZO family (once we ascertain the time)!

Just A Hedge

Wow. What a completely miserable night.

And this morning hasn’t been much better.

On the more humourous side of things Liam ate live grass, dead grass, a dead leaf, an ant, and a handful of sand at the park yesterday, on top of his rice rusks, apples, and water.

Brick Wall

So. I’ve been tense lately, and here’s part of the reason why.

Things are difficult over here. Liam’s been doing the waking up in the middle of the night thing, and the resisting naps thing. Sometimes he naps a full nap with no problem. Other times he doesn’t; the nap doesn’t happen at all, or he wakes up after the first twenty-minute cycle. Every now and again he sleeps through the night, a full twelve hours, and we rejoice; then he’s back to the waking up for an hour to an hour and a half in the middle of the night. He’s having what professionals call disturbed sleep, and we’ve been trying trying trying to teach him to self-soothe so that if he wakes up from bed or nap he doesn’t spring all the way awake and go ballistic for someone to be there with him. It’s not his teeth. We’ve determined this. He just likes company.

This morning I’d had enough, and I started to play hardball. Nap time? Well, after your regular nursing session, you go into the crib and you stay there for the duration of what should be your nap. Whether you sleep or not is up to you. I can’t hold you while you lightly doze for an hour or more, trying over and over to slip you into your crib without you figuring out what’s going on and waking up to cry. You weigh too much, and you need to be able to fall asleep on your own as the rest of the world does. You’re eleven months old, kid, and you have to acquire this skill.

He’s now passed out after a bottle, because he was so exhausted and so worked up that I knew he wouldn’t sit for solid food. He spent the time he should have been taking his morning nap standing and screaming in his crib, because I couldn’t take him screaming in my arms any more; he was resisting the soothing as much as he was resisting the sleep.

It’s frustrating for everyone. It’s reached a point where nothing works: if we let him fall asleep in our arms, he wakes up crying; if we leave him to fall asleep on his own, he cries. We’ve tried various methods of soothing at intervals, adjusting bed/nap times, scheduled nap times, the responding-to-cues nap times, the works. If all it’s going to take is a week of this, then we’ll do it. No one’s going to be happy, but it will happen. And once he can fall asleep on his own, then he won’t be so exhausted that he can’t sleep.

It’s so very upsetting that to do the right thing — namely, to teach someone how to fall asleep on their own (of course with aids such as music, loveys, etc) — it has to hurt all three people involved so much.

Please note: I’m venting, not asking for advice. In fact, I’m going to turn comments off because I don’t want to get into arguments about parenting techniques. I’m writing out some of my stress in my journal, and that’s that. If I’ve been short with you lately, chalk it up to the lack of unbroken sleep and the fraying of nerves.