Category Archives: Photographs

Four Years Old!

Four years ago today, during a humid heatwave that was nothing like the cool damp weather we’re having these days, we unexpectedly found ourselves with someone who wasn’t scheduled to arrive till after the Wicca book proofs were handed in um till after the first draft of the green witch book had been handed in er till the nursery was ready no till we were fully unpacked from the move for another nine weeks.

One…

Two…

Three…

FOUR!

The four-year doctor’s appointment is next Thursday, but we know he’s over a metre tall (he shot up over the winter; all his pants are too short), and we’re betting he’s passed forty pounds. He has been using the toilet all on his own for over a year now, and doesn’t even wear nighttime pull-ups any more. He wears size 4 tops and pants, and size 9 shoes (!!!). We love the complexity of conversation he has with us, and how he’s trying to make jokes, and how he has fun with wordplay and nonsense sounds. He sings with glee and enthusiasm, uses French randomly, counts glibly and adds simple numbers, loves crafts. He still sleeps about ten hours at night and averages a ninety-minute nap, although on special and rare occasions the nap can be forgone without spectacular meltdown, so long as we are quiet when we get home and go to bed half an hour earlier. (Although he has passed out around naptime in cars and at concerts even when told he doesn’t need to try to rest. Case in point, my recital last month: “The cello music was so beautiful I fell asleep.”) The fave foods list can pretty much be reproduced verbatim from last year: Chicken nuggets, sausages, pancakes, waffles, maple syrup, cinnamon toast, freshly baked bread, grapes, blackberries, raspberries, ice cream, blue popsicles, peanut butter sandwiches, pizza, pasta, chicken hot dogs, cheeseburgers, homemade granola bars, Rice Krispie squares, cheese, popcorn, all kinds of crackers and breadsticks, milk, apple juice, sneaks sips of iced tea when he thinks I’m not looking, “coffee” (AKA warm milk with a touch of sugar and the foam from a cappuccino on top), “tea” (AKA cambric tea without the hot water), and creamy yoghurt, with the addition of pork chops, steak, salami sandwiches, shrimp, Polo mints (just about any mint, really, but he asks for Polos by name), and “iced cappuccino” (crushed ice blended with chocolate milk, served with a straw).

Current passions: Transformers, short chapter books at bedtime, playing Go Fish, doing more complex jigsaw puzzles, writing his name everywhere, drawing on his chalkboard, going out for hot dogs and french fries ( “and a bun” he always specifies, as if he’s worried they’ll serve him a weiner alone), Lego (he is currently very proud of the Slave 1 MLG bequeathed to him, and has partially disassembled and reassembled it quite capably), and always trains and cars.

Current challenges: Getting him to use the pedals on his trike (he’s been told that he’s not getting a bicycle until he demonstrates that he can consistently use the trike pedals), getting him to understand why it’s rude to shout at people from windows (especially strangers, even if all you’re doing is shouting a cheerful “hello!”), getting him to focus on identifying letters and sounds if he doesn’t initiate it.

Things we’re very proud of: How well he behaves himself at concerts and in public, how good he is when we give him a five-minute window to play before we finish up or leave wherever we are, how much better he is at eating what we’re eating for supper instead of whining and asking for something else, how clearly he spells his name and how capably he copies words out for cards and such, how appreciative he is of gifts (“Oh, wow, this is aweshome. I’ve wanted one of these for years. Thank you!”), how polite he is when he interrupts a conversation (“Excuse me, Mama… excuse me, Mama…”).

Amusing developments: He’s started narrating the cats. One night at supper Nixie appeared in the window between the living room and the kitchen, right next to the table. She delicately used the table’s corner on her way to HRH’s empty chair. And suddenly, there was a soft running narrative in a little falsetto voice happening from my left: “Hello, don’t mind me, I’m not really on the table, I’m just on my way to this chair, yes, like this, and ooh look there’s my water bowl, I’ll just hop down to it then, thank you!” He narrates Gryff, too, in the same slightly gruff, dorky voice we use for him. It’s hilarious. We laughed till we cried when we first heard it.

He’s just… such a fabulous little boy. Even when I’m exasperated because he’s dawdling over something, I’m fully aware that I’m bothered because his behaviour generally sets a high standard that he can’t possibly maintain 24/7. He starts preschool full-time around mid-August, the last step before kindergarten. We’re so proud of him, of his character and his accomplishments. He’s fun to be with, and we’re so very fortunate to have him as part of our family.

The plan for the day: We switched his day with the caregiver to tomorrow so that we could take him out on his birthday itself. We’re headed to the train museum, then lunch out at St Hubert, otherwise known as the “chicken and french fries restaurant.” There was a party at preschool yesterday (which they handled, bless them), a little party at the caregiver’s tomorrow, and then the actual kids’ party on Saturday. I wonder if it’s possible for Sparky to get birthdayed out.

Forty-Seven Months Old!

A mere thirty-two days till he’s four years old. How time flies.

Spelling and reading continue apace. Typeset fonts (think Courier, for example) frustrate him. A typeset lowercase ‘a’ does not look like the lowercase ‘a’ he has been taught to draw by hand, nor does a ‘g’. He is very frustrated by this. Otherwise, words and letters are the most exciting things around these days. He writes his name on paper or the chalkboard all the time, or spells it aloud. He writes words in the air to see if we can identify them. (This is more of a challenge than it may sound. First of all, he’s more enthusiastic than precise, and second of all I’m reading it backwards.) We have discovered together that he very much likes copying words out, so I’ll print words and spell them out as I do, and he copies them onto another paper, spelling them out himself as he does. He’s done a few greeting cards this way. His drawing skills have leapt a couple of levels as well. He drew the first face I’ve seen him draw the other day, and he used the entire chalkboard instead of squeezing it into a corner, spacing the features out remarkably well. And last night he drew two different versions of WALL*E, both extremely recognizable. HRH is, naturally, bursting with pride.

The newest addition to the household is stuffed black rabbit with white paws, whom the boy saw on a post-Easter shelf at the drugstore we stopped at on the way out of Oakville. He instantly fell in love with him, and as it was half-price, I bought it for him. “What are you going to call him?” I asked on the way to the car. “His name is Blackie-Whitie,” Liam said with confidence. And he hasn’t put the darn thing down since that day. He’ll go all shy with people when they talk to him, but he’ll hold out the rabbit and say, “This is my new bunny, his name is Blackie-Whitie.” Sometimes he adds, “His nickname is Blackie,” just so everyone’s clear. Starting in the car on the way home from Easter, he has been saying, “Mama, you can cuddle Bun-Bun” and pushing Bun-Bun at me till I take him in the crook of my arm. We suspect he doesn’t want to hurt Bun-Bun’s feelings, which is very sensitive of him. Otherwise he drags Blackie, Bun-Bun, and the little white rabbit he called Peter until he got another tiny white bunny called Snowball/Blizzard, so the first white one is alternately Peter/Blizzard/Snowball, depending on what the tiny one is called that day) around in his arms at home, and negotiates bringing all three or five along for car rides. (One. He is allowed only one.) Blackie is now somewhat bedraggled. I mourn his silky clean fur.

(Yes, we’re fairly sure his main totem is a rabbit.)

There were two new movies this month. We finally got a copy of 101 Dalmatians on DVD (as well as the new sequel) and he went absolutely bananas over it. The rabbits were all renamed Pongo and Perdita, we played at being Dalmatians, every minivan that parked in the neighbourhood belonged to Horace and Jasper, and every car that went racing down the road and squealed around the corner was Cruella. Then Nightdemons lent us a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, a very loose remake of the book’s story (which he knows), and he went crazy for that as well. Now we are told on a regular basis that someday, Blackie will be a Real Rabbit. Every morning he checks to see if it’s happened. We keep telling him it takes a long time and a lot of cumulative love.

The other big milestones this past month were the purchase of his first board game, Chutes & Ladders (apparently Snakes & Ladders, the UK version, is no longer available in Canada and thus we ended up with the rather preachy US one, hmph), and the purchase of his first set of gaming dice. He is very enthusiastic about Chutes & Ladders, only he thinks the chutes are preferable because in the playground doesn’t one climb a ladder to get to the more exciting slide part? And he chose a d20 from his new dice to roll for his first game, which made it rather short. (His next pick was a d4, which meant the second game was abandoned after taking forever to get anywhere.) So we are working through the inevitable tears when someone else wins (“But I wanted to win!”), and the concept of luck and random dice rolls, and the idea that it isn’t the end of the world if someone else wins; we just set the board up again and start anew. It’s the fun we have playing that counts.

When the boy is about to sing something (which is often these days; he is all about the singing), he lifts his fist to his mouth and clears his throat with a tiny soft sound. I have to try not to laugh every time. In the past week he has become obsessed with “Yellow Submarine,” which is both fortunate and not. It’s an easy song, so we know it and he learned it really quickly, but it’s not exactly deep. On the other hand, when I put our Beatles “1” CD on in the car the other day, he sighed contentedly and said, “This is my favourite music.” Not bad for a kid who’d only heard it once about a year ago.

He met t! and Jan’s year-old husky/shepherd/collie dog Carter over the weekend, and was throughly thrilled. Carter has experienced a streak of bad luck and has gone from a splint to a cast to another splint on his right foreleg, and is currently wearing a Victrola-style collar so the splint doesn’t get chewed. None of this fazed Liam. He giggled and crooned and patted and ruffled the dog’s fur all day. At once point the dog leaned against him with a deep sigh, pushing the boy into the wall, but after a look at HRH to make sure everything was still okay Liam set to scritching the blissful dog with great enthusiasm. At home after a long day, he was eating his grilled cheese sandwich when he said, “What was your favourite part of the day?” I told him what I’d enjoyed, and he said thoughtfully, “My favourite part of the day was meeting and playing with Carter.” And in fact, he has named the small stuffed dog he’s had for two years (previously known by the imaginative name of “Puppy”) Carter. Also while there, he spent a couple of hours jumping around the muddy side field as it was being prepared for the orchard, splashing in puddles, testing various bits of bark and grass and dead leaves to see what floated and what didn’t, and inspecting the family of baby field mice that was found as one of the holes was dug. When he came in for lunch, thoroughly soaked and happy, there were three inches of muddy water in each rainboot. If you can’t be a kid in a place like that, where can you be one?

Forty-Six Months Old!

Or four years minus two months. The boy has become quite adept at informing people that he’s going to be [this many fingers] old on his birthday.

If I had to distill this past month down to two words, they would be singing and bunnies. I have been woken up a good five out of seven days each week by a small child burrowing under the covers with me, then singing such classic hits as “Little Bunny Foo-Foo,” the alphabet song, a little preschool ditty called “Ducks Like Rain,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” “Old Macdonald,” “Five Little Ducks,” and various little songs of his own devising. And perhaps it was the Easter thing, but he’s become obsessed with rabbits: pictures, stuffed ones, hopping around like one. He started carrying around the small white bunny my gran sent him to keep BunBun company, and just acquired a silky-soft black one for Easter whom he calls Blackie-Whitey, or Blackie for short (very inventive is my almost-four-year-old).

Ceri and Scott lent us the breathtaking Planet Earth series of nature documentaries, and we’ve been enjoying them immensely. They’re far beyond the nature shows of our youth. Of course, they do tell similar stories, and so the boy was introduced to the cycle of life rather graphically. “Why is that wolf chasing those deer?” he wanted to know. So we explained that it was chasing the caribou (ahem) because he was hungry. “RUN, CARIBOU!” he yelled at the screen. And so we talked about the fact that wolves aren’t good or bad, that this is just the way things are. We had to revisit the concept when the wild dogs chased the antelope, and the shark chased the seal (in graphic slow motion), but he eventually got it. He loves the different climates and landscapes, and all the animals, and he especially loves the planet rise in the opening title sequence.

This past month has seen a huge explosion in alphabet and letter recognition, complete with drawing letters and reading. Words he can absolutely read include Liam, Mama, Dada, cat, car, cello, train, school, and lesson. (Why have I not shown him how to write ‘book’ yet?) He demonstrates amusing logo recognition, too, pointing out Chapters, Zellers, Best Buy, and the toy store with great enthusiasm as we pass them in the car or see them in flyers. One morning we were cuddling in bed together and he started describing drawing letters. It took me a few moments to understand what he was talking about, but I clued in somewhere around the second letter. He described drawing the strokes necessary to write out his name, and I was wide awake by the end of it, at which point I gave him a huge hug. Being able to actually hold a pencil and draw it out is one thing; being able to describe it abstractly without the accompanying physical motions is pretty stupendous, in my opinion. Especially at stupid o’clock in the morning. He’s been able to write his name for a while, but now he does it clearly without prompting. He has become fascinated with the difference between upper and lowercase letters, although he’s making the classic mistake of confusing the lowercase D and B. He’s very proud of being able to write his name in lowercase letters and understands that the first letter of a name is capitalized. Serifs frustrate him, because he traces them and thinks they’re extra bars or ascenders/descenders and guesses the letter in question incorrectly, or asks what letter it is because it doesn’t match the twenty-six he knows.

The biggest new experience this month was without question riding the metro, or the ‘underground train’ as he calls it. He loved watching from the platform for the lights coming down the tunnel, watching the trains passing in the other direction, looking at the art in the stations while people got off and on; the entire experience was exciting. I’ll be taking him with me to a downtown meeting next week just so he can have another ride. The other exciting new thing is the Lego Star Wars game we bought for the Xbox, which he just adores. He figured out how to make the characters run around, jump, and attack in no time at all. Playing in co-op mode is a bit of a challenge because he’s likely to run off in the opposite direction, and the characters are yoked within a certain distance, but he’ll get better. This month’s awesome new film was Bolt.

One of the more curious things he’s been doing is pretending he’s Maggie. I know most kids pretend they’re animals at various times, but how many of them have a default pretend of being Mama’s now-deceased pet? (Not that he pretends he’s the zombie feline. You know what I mean.)
Having seen how sensitive he is about toys being forgotten in rotation, I suspect he’s doing it because he doesn’t want to forget her, or allow us to forget her. There’s a loyalty there that’s really touching. And he’s generous to a fault; in fact, he sometimes is overly generous with his lunch at school, giving it to others instead of eating it. Of course, this isn’t much of a concern for us, because he regularly eats three breakfasts. This kid isn’t anywhere near starving. He’s too cool for that.

Good Celloing

I just had an hour-long rehearsal with my duet partner that went quite encouragingly well. I recorded the session with the MiniDisc, and have now spent an hour struggling with the transfer. The first time I had the levels set too high so the bass warped everything. The second one I did was too low and had odd clicking/crackly sounds throughout it. Third time’s the charm, yes?

Beyond the somewhat argh-ness of the transfer, the entire experience was great. We bumped up the speed each time we played it through, which I was very thankful to do; I like playing it faster than I do in lessons. When we get it going at 104mm, it’s great. We both seem to have the same instinct of when to bring the pace down a notch and when to reassert the original tempo, too, which is a good thing. Apart from the usual missed notes and wrong fingers, I’m very impressed with the recording. We’re doing a great job. Considering the fact that this is the first time we’ve played it together, I’m all the more encouraged. Listening to the recording is interesting; I can’t tell who is who a lot of the time. I mean, I know what bits I play, but if I’m not concentrating I can’t tell which cello is producing the theme or the accompaniment at any given point. Which means the balance is good. And we had fewer problems than I expected; we listened to one another quite well.

Just before she arrived the postperson dropped off the box of cello goodies I won from Emily and Benning Violins! I had to leave it sitting there on the table while we played. I opened it while I was transferring the recording, and here is a photographic record, as promised to various cello players in the blogosphere!

The box of cello goodies!

The very cute little box! Emily drew little cellos and notes and bass clefs on the other side.

The open box of cello goodies...

The contents!

The contents, unpacked.

The contents, unpacked! There’s peg lubricant, polish, a microfibre cleaning cloth, the Larsen A, and a brand-new cake of Gustave Bernardel rosin. It is perhaps somewhat sad that I am very excited about the microfibre cleaning cloth. I needed a new one. I’m very excited about the rosin too, of course (the idea of spending fifteen dollars to try a new cake of rosin is alien to me), and hey, a Larsen A! But evidently all it takes is a nice blue cloth to make my day. I’m a simple creature. Thank you, Emily! I will think of you every time I swipe my bow with the rosin or clean off the cello.

Aha; on the fourth transfer I have established proper levels and volume, and there are no pops or clicks. A little voice has piped up inside my head and says, You know, the Mac Mini will come with Garage Band! This will be very exciting! I wonder if I can link my microphone directly into the extended-loan iBook to record my part for my partner to practise against, even though it doesn’t have GarageBand on it. Hmm. Worth messing about with next week. If not, the MiniDisc-to-computer it is.

And to top it all off, I have a lesson tonight. I’m looking forward to it, especially now that I’ve listened to the recording (multiple times) and know what bits really need work, and what places my partner and I will have to listen to one another extra-hard.

Forty-Five Months Old!

And only three to go before the big four years old. I have been informed that there is to be another Totoro cake. Duly noted. Also noted is the likelihood of the cake theme changing according to almost-four-year-old whim.

Someone brought home a medal from the annual preschool Olympics. They don’t give coloured medals out any more (“Because,” the director told HRH, “you would not believe how competitive they get.” “The kids?” said HRH, astonished. “No, the parents,” she said darkly. “You’re really laid back about this.”) but the director oh-so-casually pointed out that someone’s medal was strung on a gold ribbon. Apparently he’s giving the five year olds a run for their money. It’s not that he’s a conscious overachiever, he just throws himself so completely and totally into everything he does and does it with enthusiasm and energy. February was winter Olympics month at preschool, complete with preschool-geared Olympic events in which everyone participated. As HRH has a multitude of Canadian flags Liam volunteered to bring one, which meant he got to carry it in the little parade. I hope someone got pictures.

There’s a new assistant at preschool. She was helping him into his coat yesterday when he reached out and stroked her hair, saying, “You have really soft hair, like my mama’s, except hers is curly.” To which the teachers at preschool, and I when I heard it, all said, “Awwww.”

Porco Rosso was the new film he discovered this month, thanks to a deal he has going with Scott. Liam asked if we could borrow The Cat Returns from their collection, and Scott said only if he could borrow Cars and/or WALL*E and/or Ratatouille, as he and Ceri hadn’t seen them. Liam thought about it and decided they could borrow Cars and Ratatouille, but not WALL*E. Which makes sense, since it’s the newest one and he’s still a little protective of it. (Although we are personally stunned at his decision to let Cars out of the house.) Then he decided he had to go over to their house in person to effect the trade, which was fun because he ran around and around the central part of the house, and with Scott explored the little section at the top of the stairs where the boards lift right out of the floor to reveal a little hidey-hole. He also decided that he’d have to go back and watch Cars with Scott on the huge television they have set up in the basement. When we told him it was time to go he declared that he wanted to stay forever and ever, which was very sweet indeed, and quite remarkable because the cats wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

He seems to have developed a thing about food touching on his place, and sauces actually on things instead of being used as dips. And his big quirk right now is smelling things. “Can I smell it?” he’ll ask if we show him something new or put a plate of food down in front of us at the table. This applies to non-edible items as well like books, cameras, toys, clothes, pieces of paper, and so forth.

Puzzles are the current toy of obsession. He throws them together impressively quickly. He found an envelope of about six twenty-piece puzzles from a book that had gone AWOL, which had no reference pictures, and zipped through them. He also asked for black chalk the other day while drawing on his easel. HRH explained that people didn’t really use black chalk all that often, because you wouldn’t be able to see it on the chalkboard, and got a flat stare as a reply. Emo Preschooler Requires Black Chalk To Express Himself, we thought.

Books this month included yet more train books from the library, in particular an impressive pop-up one with stations and trestles and all sorts of things. And he went through all three of them plus his own Eyewitness train book and pointed out the Rocket in each of them, being very pleased to be able to match them up, too. The other awesome book discovery was Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile. Hilarious when you are on the verge of four, and so enjoyed that I’ll have to pick a copy up to own. I finally remembered that I owned the four Catwings books, so those are lined up for the next few weeks of bedtime stories because they’re the perfect balance of text and illustration, followed by the Brambly Hedge books. (In my defence, they had been moved about a year ago to a shelf which had space on it, as opposed to a shelf with other children’s books or a display shelf as they’d been kept for years.)

The new word he’s proudest of is “enormous.” Totoro is enormous! The Death Star is enormous! Our new house will be enormous! Dirigibles are enormous! If Gryff grew, he’d be enormous! The sandwich I want for dinner must be enormous! The rainforest is enormous! He’s playing with words and letters and nonsense syllables a lot, which is fun to listen to. The preschool director sent him home with five Eyewitness books and a dictionary the other day, because they didn’t have room for them any more and she knows he loves books. We may not have the room for them either, but we’ll never say no. Knowing that he loves books, loves sounds and words and illustrations, is more than enough of a pay-off. We’ll always find room for what he loves.