So the boy is precisely 100 centimetres tall. Which translates to a metre.
Yeah.
So if the boy is metre tall, you can figure out how big the cat attacking his foot is.
I’m working on the boy’s monthly post as a break from work. It should be up later this afternoon.
ETA @ 14h00: It’s up! Click here. Normally I’d tell you to scroll down but the stupid footer is overlapping it.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have achieved Lego. I was going to search for something between the sizes of the Mega Bloks he’d been using when he was younger and the standard Lego size, but apparently he’s been working with standard Lego at school, so HRH brought up the huge bag of Lego that t! bequeathed to the boy and opened it up for him. (For those who were in the S:1999 game, there were parts of Moonbase Alpha still extant but not for long. I rescued the communicator before the boy wrecked it, although he did put wheels on it before I got to it.) We have made countless cars and trains and spaceships and houses since then. If anyone’s looking for gift ideas, a pile of Lego wheels would be good because there are never enough. In the realm of toys and games HRH has also introduced him to Mario Party 8 on the Wii. And as HRH and I plan to buy ourselves Rock Band for Christmas (terribly romantic, I know, but I’d rather do this than get one another things less likely to be used) I have no doubt the boy will soon be introduced to the drums there as well.
WALL*E has succeeded in completely and utterly eradicating any other film from the boy’s memory, and it’s all he watches now. He listens to the soundtrack while playing in his room and falling asleep, and now he wanders around singing the beginning of “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” as if he was our very own Michael Crawford. It’s adorable to hear him burble, “Listen, Barnaby!” and “we won’t come home until we’ve kissed a girl!” Book-wise, we’ve just finished The Wind in the Willows, and are about to start on Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House series. We all love the snuggling in the big bed and reading a chapter every night.
The biggest news this past month was the bunk bed tree fort (which is what he calls it, although the fort does double duty as a pirate ship at times, as seen in the picture). HRH and I love the twin size bed because we can actually stretch out on it and cuddle him. The boy loves it because he can roll around on it, and he loves playing on the upper level (it’s where all the tins of Lego are stored). We’ve moved all his toys into his room now, and the living room is once again a free zone. He brings toys out, but we’re enforcing the put-the-others-away-before-you-play-with-a-new-one rule.
One of the other exciting things that’s happened this month is of course the piles of snow we’ve already received. Even when there was only a scattering and the grass was still visible, he made the most of it. “I’ve never seen any child make so much out of so little,” his educator told HRH. “He was rolling in it that first day.” We’ve been adding a few seasonal decorations as the days go by. He made cut-out Christmas trees and painted a cone I’d made to look like a tree, and helped make paper chains, too. We introduced him to the Advent calendar, but he forgets most of the time (and so do we, really). Evidently we’re not doing a very good job differentiating between the season and the day itself, because Liam goes back and forth between flinging a hand out at all the snow and lights and saying, “But it *is* Christmas!” and saying very seriously in reply to something we say, “But it’s not Christmas *yet*.” Poor kid. It must be hard for him to figure out the difference because there are all sorts of Christmas-related activities going on like parties and concerts. The upstairs neighbours even hung the usual Yule stockings on the banister and he ‘s just angsting over what’s inside them. He’s at the age now where he knows he’s not supposed to open them, but that he’s still young enough that if he ‘forgot’ that he’s not supposed to open them he might get away with it. (In his mind, that is, not in our eyes.) I’d wrapped Mousme‘s hat in a gift bag and set it in to corner of the room until I next see her and he found it, bringing it into the kitchen while I was making dinner. “Oh, Mama, what’s this?” he said. “It’s Mousme’s hat,” I said. “Oh, can I see what’s inside?” he said. And before I could say No, or Yes but be very careful because it’s not yours, he had slipped the tissue paper out of the bag and deftly unwrapped it. Even though he’d seen me knitting it and had seen the finished product he held it up and said, “Oh, Mama, it’s beautiful! Great job!” Then he wrapped it back up again and slipped it back into the bag, and even replaced the bag exactly where it had been. So he got the fun of unwrapping a present after all, and he practised his gracious comments on a received item, and complimented me all at the same time. We’ll see how much of that he remembers in the upcoming week.
He’s figured out that knitting is something that I do and enjoy, and he wants to help. So he’ll come up to me and pick up the ball of yarn and say, “I’ll be your helper and hold this for you.” Which would be fine if he actually did hold it, but he doesn’t. He lifts it and pretends it’s a balloon, or drops it and then the cat chases it, or some other sort of mishap occurs. When it warmed up enough for me to wear my red coat and newly knitted scarf he looked at me while struggling to get his arms into his coat sleeves. “Why are you wearing that yarn around your neck?” he said. I thought it was interesting that he knows a knitted item is made of yarn, and that once it’s knitted up he stills identifies it as yarn, not whatever object it’s been knitted into.
In the milestone category, he left his first voice mail message on Ceri’s birthday. Despite coaching as to what to expect, when the beep sounded and the time came to leave his message he kind of hung there, a tiny smile on his face, waiting for someone to say something. I finally got him to say “Happy birthday!!!” (kind of slurred together and rushed and somewhat shouted), then I disconnected the call for him. I left a message afterwards explaining what had just happened. Ceri seemed amused by the effort he’d made, so all was well. He left his first blog comment this month, too. And of course he attended his first evening concert.
At his semiannual checkup the doctor reported that he weighs 35 lbs and stands 100 centimetres tall. That’s right; he’s hit a metre. We’re going through shoes like there’s no tomorrow; he’s gone up three shoe sizes in the past twelve months. He’s maintaining a steady weight and stretching upwards. I knew this before the doctor measured him because his 3T pants no longer need to be folded up like they did a couple of months ago. It’s unreal. He’s been going on eating binges too, where he essentially grazes all day and has two or three helpings of dinner. I was most impressed by this doctor’s appointment. For the first time Liam answered all of her questions himself (very clearly, too) and stood still on the scale and against the height chart.
He’s turning into more and more of a character every day. It’s great fun. I feel bad sometimes that I can’t keep up with him (well, he was home for almost six days straight with a bad cold last week, and I was sick too, but still) and my temper gets short when he doesn’t listen or ignores what we’re telling him (ditto), but he is three and a half and testing whatever boundary he can. For every frustration there are half a dozen things to love about him and praise. We’re lucky to have him.
Other Liam posts this past month:
– Liam attends his first non-Canada Day evening concert, and attends a cello lesson
– “You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don’t go down with me”
– Liam helps us vote in the provincial election
– the arrival of the bunk beds and the rearranging of the bedroom
– a future as the drummer in a punk band
– overheard from the back seat of the car
I debated about posting this, but why not.
Someone made a video recording of about half of the recent LCO fall concert. It’s broken into approximately eight-minute long sections, so you can see the first and second part of the three-movement Mozart Divertimento (the second part covers the second and third movements), the lovely Adagio for Clarinet and Strings (the so-called “Wagner adagio”, which has some nice close-ups of Martine’s hands for you clarinet players out there), and the Haydn Symphony 104 in D major (first part, second part, third part, and fourth part). I wish I could say each part actually corresponds to a movement, but they don’t. The first part is most of the first movement, the second part is the end of the first and most of the second, the third is the rest of the second and the full minuet/trio, and the fourth is the fourth movement in its entirety.
Why did I consider not posting this? Well, mainly due to the fact that the sound is awful. It’s very flat and quite distorted. (Although I recognise that not all the distortion is due to the recording. Ahem.) The balance is completely off, and things are very muddy. Hand-held video cameras just aren’t designed to record such a wide range of sound level, especially from that distance in a very echoey venue. And as such, it isn’t particularly complimentary. But it’s an idea of what went on. Also, it’s fun to see what the audience members are doing while we play. (I was amused by the people nodding and tapping their programmes during the minuet, and by the kids.)
And yes, I am cleverly hidden by my teacher’s scroll most of the time through the Mozart and the Adagio! Although the videographer seems to have moved forward for the first two-thirds of the symphony and therefore there is a better view of me from a three-quarter back angle in those recordings. (And thus my pathological avoidance of vibrato has been preserved for prosperity. I’m working on that now in my lessons.) Also, good gods, does my left hand always look that spidery?
This is the first half of the programme. I wonder if the videographer recorded the last half, and if it will be posted.
I just wanted to share this little fact with you: Life is okay. In fact, it is verging on Downright Good.
The gathering at the Fearsranch was much lower-key that initially advertised. First of all, there were three or four people missing, which made things so very much easier for me. And second, everyone was tired, it being the end of a week and after long amounts of travel on pretty much everyone’s part. The fact that every single individual I met in person for the first time was Made of Good Stuff helped immensely, too. Everyone was Made of Win. I expected this of Bodhifox, my main reason for being there, who felt exactly the same in-person as he does in his journal and over e-mail, but I didn’t have more than a passing familiarity with the others and no expectations whatsoever (beyond “eep people I do not know”). So Made of Win was a good thing. And my flatlining wasn’t as much of a handicap as I’d feared.
There was food. There was drumming. There was cask-strength Macallan. There was a lovely huge bonfire. There was good sleep. There was glorious sun, and breakfast, and discussions about house building (and oven-building and erecting mead halls and rebuilding the front porch), and sad goodbyes said. And there is photographic evidence plus summary and another decent summary the likes of which I don’t have the brainpower to pull off.
Pretty much the only bad thing that happened was I somehow flipped my knitting around and knit three or four rounds before realising it. I pulled the circular needles out and discovered that my swatch had lied to me (with great huge lies! I will never trust yarn again!) and if I had in fact finished the hat the way it was dear Mousme would be wearing it around her shoulders instead of her head. So I pulled the whole thing apart and cast on forty less stitches, and now I have five inches of hat and just made my first ever decrease! Had the Dreadful Thing occurred at home I would have gone ballistic, but the combination of being exhausted and happy and being elsewhere made everything all right.
We’re making pulled barbecue pork for dinner, and feeding a couple of friends whom we called on the off chance they were free (this will never work — you are? yay!). We came home from the Fearsranch with perry (pear cider, with which I am in love), and there is beer now too. I intend to bake Brie. No, I don’t understand it in the least. I’m exhausted. I should be comatose and unable to function. But somehow the night out with excellent people and the subsequent breakfast revived me. HRH and I are considering monthly or bi-monthly Friday night escapes, if they’re this good. And when you get home it’s only early Saturday afternoon, so you still have half a day plus another whole day of weekend.
And now I am going to go knit some more. I wonder if I’ll get to the double-pointed needles part of the project today. At this rate Mousme will certainly have the hat by Yule, and possibly much earlier. (Yes, I was worried about that before. But removing forty stitches from a round makes things progress so much faster.)
Our apocalypse; let us show you it.
Or three and a third years old, for those counting in years.
“What are you going to dress up as for Hallowe’en?†Liam asked us excitedly at dinner the other night. HRH and I looked at one another, and we both grinned. It’s been ages since we did costumes (would they have been for the last superhero party, or the final Hallowe’en party t! threw?). Suddenly here was our son encouraging us to do the Hallowe’en thing, because as far as he knows everyone dresses up at Hallowe’en. We have no time to do new costumes for ourselves; any costume-creation effort will be focused on him. So I gave my costume wardrobe a quick once-over in my mind and said, “I think I’ll go as Belle.†“Oh, Mama,†he said, “that’s a great idea!†HRH has decided to make himself an Incredibles t-shirt to wear to school, so I think that will be the extent of his costume. As for what the boy will be wearing, we are not yet sure. There is the pirate coat we planned for last year that never got made, and apart from that he has alternately decided to be Dash from the Incredibles, Mr. Incredible, and a diesel locomotive. I suspect we will have to set a deadline for a final decision. This year will be the first year he goes out trick or treating, and I believe he expects us both to go out with him (because again, as far as he knows, everyone does it!). Must check with the upstairs neighbours to see if they would be good with handling kids at the door while we go out for half an hour.
Over the past couple of months he has developed an odd use of the third person to describe himself and his actions, as if he is narrating the activity of a character in a story. “Mama, said the [kitten/robot/fish/whatever he is pretending to be today], what are we having for lunch?†he’ll say. It’s interesting.
He’s sleeping really well, anywhere between an hour and a half and two hours of nap in the early afternoon, and ten hours at night. And he’s so close to making it through all those ten hours at night completely dry. Sometimes he manages it, sometimes he doesn’t. And when he doesn’t it’s usually the wetting that wakes him up just before our scheduled wake-up time, and he’s so upset and frustrated. (Jury’s out regarding the classification of the amount of frustration connected with the wetting, and the amount associated with being jolted awake before he would wake up on his own.)
School continues to go very well. They call him their sparkplug (familiar, what?), the one whose enthusiasm and energy gets everyone else active and involved. He plays with the older kids, then goes to the younger kids, and then to the kids his own age, and integrates seamlessly into each group; apparently he’s the only one who ranges between groups like that. The CD player was being fixed when he started school, but when it came back and they did a unit on music he was right there, attentive and interested. It’s his favourite thing there, or at least the one that keeps his attention the longest, we’re told. He brings home new songs all the time (not that we recognize them, because although he is enthusiastic he is not necessarily reproducing them correctly), and loves songs with actions accompanying them. The other day he was making odd vowel sounds to the tune of Frère Jacques, one of the tunes they adapt a lot at preschool, then saying someone’s name: “[vowel sound] [vowel sound] Heidi, [vowel sound] [vowel sound] Heidi…†It took me a half hour of hearing him sing this to himself while playing before it clicked and suddenly it made sense. He was singing the morning welcome song ( “Where is Ashley, where is Ashley? Here she is, here she is!â€) in French. Ou est Heidi? Aha.
His food preferences have no consistency that I can see. He refused applesauce for months, and has enthusiastically eaten bowls of it for the past two weeks. Every time I made homemade macaroni and cheese for dinner he’d cry and ask for plain noodles, but last night he dug in to the bowl I put in front of him with gusto and even had seconds. At breakfast he asks for a mélange of Rice Krispies, Cheerios, Shreddies, and organic kamut flakes in various combinations. Cold pancakes are still a great snack. Oatmeal is back. Apparently he wasn’t eating well at school lunches, pushing things around his plate and saying, “I don’t like it,†but that’s been worked out (part of it was low appetite leading into the cold then the tummy bug thing, part of it was a sudden discomfort with the schedule, yet another part was that he was having huge breakfasts and enthusiastic mid-morning snacks and thus not hungry at lunch). The deal at home is you eat three big bites of what’s on your plate and if you decide you don’t like or want it, you can politely refuse the rest, but we’re not going to make you something else. Generally it’s not an issue, and if it is for some reason, he learns that being hungry later isn’t so much fun. We’re not in the least concerned that he won’t eat enough; that will never be a problem!
In general he’s still a cheerful, inventive, imaginative boy with great enthusiasm for just about everything. He loved bringing his carrots into school to share with all his friends there, and told them that he helped plant them, water them, and harvest them. He and Gryff have been celebrating the turn of the season by galumphing up and down the hall, chasing one another. Falling leaves mean playing in piles of them, messing about with sticks, and finding very cold bumblebees to tuck into the garden in hopes that they will find a warm place in which to hibernate. Decreasing hours of daylight means getting ready for the day in the morning when it’s still dark, and going to bed when the sun has gone down. “Maybe it will snow from those clouds!” he says eagerly. Everything is interesting and fun. And it’s good to have someone discovering fun things around.
On this day nine years ago, in the company of family and dear chosen family on a spectacular autumn day, I married my best friend.
Today also marks the eleventh anniversary of HRH and I doing our first road trip together, one of the joys I have continued to experience with him throughout our marriage.
As for this year’s cool gift, I bought him a stunning hand-forged ritual knife from Helmut at the Hamilton PPD festival, the blade done in Odin’s Eye damascene steel and the handle made of antler from Manitoba. (He bought me a tiny knife with a handle in African blackwood and the guard in bone. True love in this household means gifting your spouse with a blade. Or a new gaming console.)
Ten years next year. I find it really hard to wrap my mind around that. We’ll have spent a quarter of our lives together.
This past year hasn’t been easy; in fact, I think we could safely mark it as the Worst Ever (and we’d survived some pretty depressing setbacks already). But there’s no one else I’d rather have spent it with. By hanging on and working together we’ve managed to turn things around so that now we’re looking at quite possibly one of the best years yet. And we have so many more years together ahead of us to just keep making them better. Thanks, HRH.