Category Archives: Photographs

Shoes! Glasses! Hair!

I surprised myself by problem-solving the camera issue. The laptop didn’t recognise the camera either, which leads me to suspect a camera issue and not a USB port issue (which doesn’t change the fact that I need the extra USB ports and will install them tonight). Vaguely remembering that the memory card I bought for the camera came with a card reader, I dug it out (surprise! I found it), yanked the card from the camera and managed to snap it into the reader, found a USB port on the box that would accept it, and transferred the photos. Voila: pictures!

New glasses and haircut (and tanned face and chest but white neck, I see, sigh):

These are last week’s news, though. What I am much more excited about (because they are newer, you understand) are the shoes!

Yes! I have green shoes. Huzzah!

What were once boring beige shoes…

(I wish I had an image to show you, I really do) that looked very similar to this, although a shade or two lighter… more of a mushroom colour than camel

…are now a dark emerald!

The ‘gently apply dye with the sponge in a circular rubbing motion’ didn’t work at all (talk about uneven and no dye really sinking in, and yes, I did the scrub-with-the-preparation-liquid thing), so after a go at the rubbing I just painted the stuff on with the little brush. It needs a final coat to even things out (I will use the sponge and rub this time, I promise, and I see that I need to touch up the seam where the leather is attached to the soles) but wow, am I ever pleased with how they turned out. (And evidently I have one basic pose for photos of shoes on my feet.)

Did I mention that red shoes are damn well everywhere this season? I am miffed. This means that in two years there ought to be green shoes widely available in desirable colours and funky styling.

Right — I must grab a notebook and my bag and head off to the doctor.

It Figures

Someone gets a really good picture of me at the last orchestra concert… and I’m not playing my cello.

Because if I’m not playing, I’m marking up my music in the desperate hope that a new fingering added half an hour before the concert begins will actually help. Sigh.

Thirty-Eight Months Old!

I think the biggest milestone over the past month has been Liam’s first official haircut. I’ve been cutting it myself at home when I could, but it was getting to the point where I couldn’t keep it as even as it should be, so in he went. He was pleasantly distracted by the movie they were showing (CARS!), and ran up to his stylist to thank her twice at the end of it all. He chose a red lollipop, naturally; they seem to be his favourites. The other big thing this past month has been the bike trailer. He has dragged everyone who has stopped by down to the garage to show it off.

His current favourite books are the Henry and Mudge series. Like lots of the other books we read together they’re early reader books, but they’re perfect to read aloud. Henry is a very Liamish boy. Mudge is, well, a huge Great Dane. Liam started calling Gryff Mudge for a while. And let me tell you, when they galumph and chase one another up and down the hall, Gryff certainly sounds like a Great Dane. (HRH told me the vet weighed Gryff when he was taken in with the infected bite, and he’s eleven pounds now. Gah.) I love looking in the rear view mirror while driving and seeing him sitting casually in his booster seat, legs loosely crossed, a book held open on his lap.

In the food division, the recent winners are ice cream bars on sticks, corn on the cob, and any kind of meat on a bone of some sort. Seriously. It gives us both great pleasure to watch him hold a bone in his hands and tear the meat off with his sharp little teeth. His snack of choice is fresh mangetout peas from the garden. (Note to self: plant lots and lots more mangetouts next year.) Last week he ate a banana as if it was a cob of corn — peeled it completely then held it horizontally and ate bites out of it that way. He has also discovered what he calls ‘iced cappuccinos’. I crush some ice cubes in the blender, add some milk and chocolate syrup, blend it all together, and serve it to him with a straw. It’s basically a chocolate milk frappé, but to him it’s a very grown-up drink and he loves it.

Current fave music is the Snacktime album by the Barenaked Ladies. He’ll even dance to it, and encourage other people to dance as well. He still won’t let other people sing it, though. “No,” he’ll say, “that’s my song.” Meaning, of course, that no one else is allowed to sing it. He’s still a big fan of ‘The Mesopotamians’ and ‘Dr. Worm,’ too.

He’s been having trouble with his sleep patterns lately. His naps have been comparatively brief (an hour instead of two), and he’s been fighting bedtime in general. He gets up after the door has closed, cries, and pushes our buttons. It’s hard to keep the frustration under wraps. He wakes up between five and six AM, often with a mid-night waking as well. We’re buying a set of bunk beds from HRH’s officemate next month, and I’m hoping the novelty of a big bed will help him stay in it. We’ll get to choose new sheets and a coverlet, too. We plan to set up the bunkbeds but leave the upper mattress and the ladder off the unit. Voila: instant tent once one has hung fabric off the two open sides.

On the other night-time hand, he’s only wearing a pull-up at night in case of emergency, and he’s dry more often than not. So good for him.

We’ve been having problems in general with whining and encountering resistance to any idea that isn’t his own. We try to remind him or tell him ahead of time about things so as to avoid the sudden change of direction or activity, but the immediate response to any prompt is still resistance. In fact, he’s been resisting things in general, running the gamut from deliberately doing the opposite of what we ask to simply ignoring us, to throwing a fit. I know he’s working things out, testing boundaries and confirming structure, but it’s very wearing. He’s also been very screechy and shouty. Liam is a very strong personality, and it’s hard to grit one’s teeth when he looks at you and does something deliberately to provoke you. Forget the terrible twos; these are the infamous threes. Not to imply that he’s a stress all the time; there are long stretches of fun and cheery Liam, and then suddenly there is a horrid moment of vexation derived from naughty behaviour or something positively Not On, for which he gets a turn in the Time Out chair. (Suddenly turning around and biting Mama for no reason until the teeth meet but the skin isn’t broken qualifies as one of those Not On things. Especially when followed by laughter.)

I figured it was about time he got to play with one of the consoles, so I bought Endless Ocean for him to play, and he’s having a ball. He feels extremely important holding the Wii remote, and once we’ve set the game up he won’t let us touch it. We’d opened it and played it before HRH came home that day, and Liam took great delight in showing HRH how things worked (going so far as to say, “Here, Dada, I’ll show you how it works” in a very officious manner). He’s lost his game a couple of times by hitting a sequence of buttons, but he doesn’t care; he likes being able to move the diver around and switch between first-person and third-person views. And he is very chuffed about having figured out where the A button is. He acquired his dolphin friend over the weekend and now has way too much fun making it do tricks.

When he sees that my computer is on he gathers a bunch of his trains up and patters into my office, eagerly saying, “Hi Mama, can I play in your office? Can I watch Thomas and friends?” He has discovered the joys of YouTube, and the seemingly endless supply of child-directed reenactments of Thomas episodes using the actual episode narration and toy trains moved around in front of a video camera. It’s the main reason I want the laptop up and running properly again, so I can work and he can do his internet-related stuff at the same time. ( “I’m working,” he said importantly the other day when I’d gotten the laptop up and running, albeit temporarily, as he sat there and typed away at the keyboard. “I’m sending you a message.”)

He is very sensitive, and he’s working that out in his own way too. He unintentionally made me cry the other day. He trundled his blanket-covered toy shopping cart up to me. “Mama,” he said in a coaxing singsong way, “I have a surprise for you!” “Really? A surprise?” I said. “Wow! What is it?” Liam whisked the blanket away to reveal the little stuffed black and white cat he now calls Maggie. “Ta-da!” he said. “It’s Maggie-cat!” And I burst into tears, surprising both of us. He looked very unsure as I reached out and picked the toy up and crushed it to my chest. “Thank you,” I said. “Mama?” he said uncertainly. “Are you okay?” “Yes, lovey,” I said through the tears. “It’s just that you surprised me. And I miss my Maggie-cat so very much, more than I thought I did, I guess.” He still looked kind of spooked, so I held out my arms and cuddled him along with the toy. I couldn’t stop the damn sobbing, not for a while. He cuddled me and patted my arm, and finally said, “It’s okay Mama. It’s just a stuffed Maggie.” And I laughed through my tears. I his world, it made sense. And sometimes we need to take a three-year-old’s point of view and say to ourselves yes, it’s just a stuffed Maggie. There’s no need to be upset. She’s something to squeeze and love and play with, and if we can’t have the real Maggie (as he seems to finally understand, or at least he’s stopped saying “We’ll find her again later” at any rate) then a stuffy is just fine.

Liam-themed posts over the past month:

– The new bike trailer
– Mama’s birthday, Liam’s first car wash, and Mama’s new bike

If you missed the 37 month post (and didn’t we all) I did one a couple of weeks ago and back-dated it.

Thirty-Seven Months Old!

This is a retrospective photo post; I missed the date and was swamped with other stuff.

First of all, we have Liam cutting out cookies being baked for his third birthday party:

Here we have Liam and I playing in his pool:

Gryff may the the one with the most patience where the boy is concerned these days. Here he demonstrates just how tolerant he can be of Liam’s shenanigans:

And finally, Liam took helping his father get my new birthday bike ready very seriously:

Liam-themed posts over the past month:

~Liam’s third birthday party!
~Explaining death to Liam
~Liam demonstrates the preschool love of Great Tragedy as played by his Collection of Trains
~Liam discovers The Sound of Music
~Liam loves They Might Be Giants
~Liam has a nightmare
~Liam and Mama pay the car registration
~Liam’s first Canada Day concert!

Goodbye, Maggie-Cat

Last night, at around eleven-twenty, Maggie passed away.

I had gone to bed and was asleep by nine-thirty. HRH woke me up around eleven-forty to say, “You need to get up. Something’s happened, love. Maggie’s dead.”

She was just outside the door to my office, lying on her side with her eyes open, staring at nothing. She was still warm. There was a bit of blood and clear fluid on the floor under her head. She’d been rattling when she breathed for the past couple of days, and she’s been coughing for months. She just finally wore out. HRH had found her when he came upstairs after playing on the computer.

I sat there and stroked her for about half an hour, thinking about the seventeen years we’d spent together. She’s been with me through all my boyfriends, eight different apartments, five other cats in the family, a baby who became a toddler and an enthusiastic preschooler who was so proud of being able to pick her up. She was the first to meet us when we brought Liam home, peeking into the carry seat. She’s been with me for everything important: my university graduations, my wedding, our celebrations, writing my books, and a part of most of Liam’s milestones too.

Maggie’s favourite spot to sleep was in the curve of my stomach when I lay on my side. She was the only cat who would stay in the room when I played my cello. When I first began playing, she would jump onto the chair behind me and stand on her hind legs, resting one paw on my shoulder and touching the scroll with the other. When she was a kitten, her favourite pieces of music were Schubert’s Trout quintet and the Death and the Maiden quartet. (I’m not kidding. She used to jump up onto the bookcase that housed my CD player and sit in front of the speakers when I put the CD on.) When she was little she used to suck on one of my knuckles and knead my hand, because she and her littermates lost their mother at only two weeks old; it took her ages to grow out of the habit. She was also the only cat who would do ritual with me, walking through the circle and sitting nearby to keep me company while I worked, leaving once the circle was down. Mags was usually the most social of our cats, coming out to casually insinuate herself into a group of friends until someone realised that there was a cat on their lap. t! coined the term “Breyfogling” to describe a particular sideways prance she’d do as a young cat, her back arched and her head tossed back so that she was all angles yet flowing, because if she’d been wearing a cape while she did it she’d look just like a Norm Breyfogle panel. The tip of her left ear was bent back, from an unidentifiable accident when she was a kitten.

Maggie was just always around me. She’d be on a cushion on the floor of the office if I was working. She’d be next to me on the bed if I was lying down. If I sat on the couch to read, she’d be in my lap. I used to have to push her off my office chair if I’d left it to get a drink or a reference book, because she’d steal it whenever she got a chance. She had dozens of nicknames: Mags, Maglet, Princess Maggie Puss-Meow, Mugwort, and the name almost everyone knew her by, Maggie. Her full name was Margaret. She loved bagels and would claw through a plastic bag to get them. She was even more insane about old-fashioned doughnuts dipped in granulated sugar. She would literally climb your arm to get to one if you held it above your head to keep it out of her reach. She also loved french fries (specifically McDonalds’ fries, not that we had them often and stopped eating them years ago); she would hook one out of the box and catch it in her mouth, then give a sharp shake of her head to, well, break its neck before she ate it. She enjoyed the occasional slice of olive from a vegetarian pizza. She also liked drinking mint tea.

Telling Liam this morning was almost as hard as making myself stop stroking her last night, as wrapping her in a deep brown towel before laying her gently in a cat carrier. I took his hands and said, “I have something important to tell you. Maggie is dead. She died last night while we were asleep.” “She’s gone?” he said, and his face began to crumple up. “But I want to see her again!” Then came the question of why, and I had to explain that when cats get very very old, they slow down and get tired, and eventually they just lay their heads down and die; it’s part of life. We assured him that he would see her again in the Summerlands, and that Gully was taking good care of her for us right now.

Some past Maggie-themed posts:

Maggie gets her own back at the annoying machines that steal her laps
Maggie turns sixteen

And there are others that were lost in the Great MySQL Crash, notably the “Here at the Maggie Institute for Lentil Research” post that recounted the day t! came over for lunch and Maggie sat on his lap, carefully hooking her paw over the edge of his bowl of soup and delicately coaxing a lentil out of it.

She was my baby, the first cat I ever got on my own. Seventeen years is a long, long run, and she had a wonderful life. I will miss her, but I’ve known she would eventually fade away. She’d been fading for months, feeling slower and slower when I placed a hand on her, feeling lighter and lighter as if she was losing energy. I always hoped she’d die in her sleep, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there at the very end for her. But she knew I loved her deeply. And somewhere in the Summerland there’s a big orange cat butting his head against hers, and another black and white cat who is perhaps less annoying in the afterlife than he was in this life licking the top of her head like he used to do.

Because she died at home, I don’t have a memento of her in the way of the fur a vet shaved from the area for the injection, the way we do for Gully and Roman. It feels odd not to have something of hers left, although I know that somewhere we must still have the black collar she used to wear. She never had a favourite toy or blanket. Once upon a time I thought I’d want her cremated and her ashes back, but I know I don’t need that now. I don’t really need a memento, because she’s always with me.

Thank you for everything, Maggie. I love you so very, very much. I hope I gave you as much joy and comfort during our time together as you gave to me.

Party!

Huzzah! The first kids-only (except for their parents, and the grown-up kid!) birthday party has come and gone, and not only are we alive, we’re pretty darn pleased with it all. The boy behaved beautifully, from the moment he jumped up with excitement and exclaimed “My friends are here!” when the door bell first rang, to the hugs and thank yous as he opened gifts and then again as each friend left.

This year’s masterpiece, designed and decorated by HRH:

(Do you sense a theme to this year’s party? Invitations, thank you cards for the little gift bags given to each attendee, and yes, he was even wearing a Totoro t-shirt I made for him using a transfer.)

Note to self: morning birthday parties with a bit of lunch for the kids = awesome idea. Perhaps next time I should make a third pizza or a second foccaccia, too, and not burn the front edge (first time I made pizza in the new oven, argh… at least now I know to do it at a lower heat). The boy is now napping soundly, and will be able to play with his new toys once he wakes up. He already made me assemble the play shopping cart and roamed all over the house with it on the way to bed for a rest (including two bathroom trips).

It was fun to play with little friends we don’t see that often, but there was also a touch of sadness, as Liam’s friend Arthur is moving to Windsor with his parents on Monday. They were the last to leave, and the boys gave each other a couple of very sweet hugs. We’ll miss them.

I’m thankful the rain held off so everyone could run and jump and play outdoors. We ended up taking the food outside, too. All in all, a good morning. Now that it’s over, I’m not quite sure what to do for the rest of the day. I didn’t sleep very well last night, but I’m restless and can’t settle down. I would eat cake, except my last solid meal was thirty-one hours ago and a piece of foccaccia, three cups of tea, and a square of cake haven’t done much to fill the gap.

And I have to admit that I actually did make cookies this morning, because there was so! much! frosting! left over. In the shape of threes, naturally, following through on the ones and twos I made for the previous birthdays. Liam helped me frost them.

Thanks to everyone who came out, especially those with other commitments weighing on them in the form of packing, sick kids, and other birthday parties to travel to. We appreciated everyone’s company!

Three Years Old!

Three years ago today, during a humid heatwave very like unto the one that has just passed, I gave birth to someone who would very quickly prove himself to be a spectacular kid.

One…

Two…

THREE!

Happy birthday, Liam! Here’s to a year of exciting discoveries, lots of fun, and love!

As of the doctor’s appointment yesterday: 97 cm tall (a breath away from one metre, yikes!), 33 lbs, and in the 65th percentile for everything. Wearing a diaper only at night in case, otherwise underwear (not that there aren’t accidents when he gets distracted, but hey), size 8 shoes, size 3 pants, and 3x tops. Loves chicken nuggets, sausages, pancakes, waffles, maple syrup, cinnamon toast, freshly baked bread, grapes, blackberries, ice cream, blue popsicles, peanut butter sandwiches, pizza, chicken hot dogs, cheeseburgers, homemade granola bars, Rice Krispie squares, cheese, popcorn, 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. Sleeps approximately ten to eleven hours at night, with a one and a half to two hour nap in the afternoon. Loves baths and pools. Jumps, somersaults, swings, rolls, stomps, claps, and is impressively good at rhythm. Is somewhat shy about singing, but loves to recite the alphabet, to count, and to paint letters. Still adores books. He frustrates the heck out of me sometimes when I’ve told him to do/to not do something a million times, but I love him so much I can’t express it.

Spectacular kid. And we have so much more to discover.