Category Archives: Photographs

Thirty Months Old!

As he grows older these updates are becoming very hard to do in the way I used to do them, so I’m making it easier on myself just noting things down and doing a kind of photo album instead: fewer deep observations, tighter prose. I miss the slightly more emotional tone, but I just can’t capture it the same way as he ages. I think it has something to do with how he’s becoming more and more of his own person. He moves me just as deeply, but in ways that are harder to define in a monthly post. I’ll also link posts I’ve done throughout the month with Liam-associated milestones or observations for reference.

So, here we go.

Liam no longer walks to the car; he ‘walks in a snow!’. And when the world is so very white and so very fluffy, one cannot blame him for recategorizing the snow along the way as more important than getting in the car to go wherever we’re going. He keeps trying to pick up chunks of snow on the driveway, to bring them into the car or into the house, whichever way it is that we’re heading. Fortunately the chunks have always self-destructed before he reaches his destination, so we haven’t yet had to have the talk about the ephemeral nature of snowballs. He is very solicitous of my safety outside too: “Careful, Mama, it slippy,” he tells me with very precise delivery. He is fascinated with snowplows and snow removal vehicles (but then, who isn’t?). And he keeps wanting to eat handfuls of snow, which wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t trying to pick it up off the driveway.

Lately he has jumping about like a mad thing, and both feet leave the ground. This is a great improvement over the jumping motion with the body, knees bent and all, but without the departure of soles from floor as he did a few months ago when he started ‘jumping’. Last month one foot got off the ground; now both feet do. Liam jumps about ‘like a kangaroo!’ with immense enthusiasm. His co-ordination is improving daily, probably due to the challenge of moving about in snow gear. He goes up and down stairs with ever more confidence, and improves at climbing in and out of the car daily. He can whip a kitchen chair over to the counter and handle things on the surface a bit too well now for comfort. And he brushes his teeth on his own remarkably well, although HRH still needs to do a quick follow-up to make sure everything is clean.

When he trips or accidentally whacks his hand against a doorframe or some such thing, he wails — no tears, just the wails — then kisses his hand or his own knee and keeps on going. Mother-makes-it-better kisses are already being phased out. Soon I will be redundant. Also, I am no longer allowed to dance or move in any kind of rhythmic fashion when music is playing. I should have seen it coming when I was forbidden to sing.

His new favourite film is The Cat Returns. Current favourite books include Ten Apples Up On Top! (for which he insists on having an apple to balance in his head, then eats it while reading the other books before bed), The Tale of Tom Kitten, and The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Liam counts things incessantly: orange slices, the ducks in the bath, stairs, chicken nuggets… We’re hearing the use of ‘mine’ and ‘my’ a lot all of a sudden. The need to classify things as belonging to someone has become very important. “That my cat,” he says of Maggie, “that my chair, that my kitchen, that my mama, that my dada; that Mama’s book, that Dada’s boots.” Also frequently heard is the exclamation of “OH NO! ROBOTS!”, which kills me every time, especially when he’s playing with his trains. Evidently robots are the antagonists of choice in Liam’s play world. The other new saying is “Let me be!”, used when we try to get him dressed or up and moving when he’s doing something.

Firsts this month include dinner at an adult friends’ house with no other children, during which he behaved himself well (thank you, Ceri and Scott), and the introduction to the joys of a ball pit (for which we thank you again, ADZO).

He got a pair of new boots last week. He’s wearing size 3X to 4 tops, size 7.5 to 8 shoes, and size 3 pants now. He’s sleeping ten to eleven hours at night, and has on average a two-hour nap in the afternoon. Liam has his two and a half year old appointment with the doctor at her new location on Thursday, so we’ll have formal measurement of weight and height and so forth then. We know he’s over thirty pounds, and guess he’s around 33. I’ll update this post with the particulars when I’ve got them.

Pertinent posts about Liam this past month:

First day of playing in significant snowfall, and dinner with Ceri and Scott
Liam tries to pluralize
Liam requests a song of Mama
Kissmas and spontaneous expressions of love

And now… more photos!

And the thoughtful/serene/peaceful photo to wrap it all up:

Twenty-Nine Months Old!

Some kids look more like their mothers, others like their fathers. So far, Liam has been a pretty balanced blend of myself and HRH. I find it interesting that if I’m holding him people say he looks more like his dad, but if HRH is holding him they say Liam looks more like me. However, it is undeniable that in this picture his expression demonstrates that he is, at the precise moment of the photograph, my son through and through:

(We’d just been baking, which explains the flour. The upside-down chair in the hallway, well… I can only imagine that he saw something on a high bookshelf somewhere that he wanted a closer look at.)

His handle on language gets better all the time. It makes me smile when I hear a clear “Please may I have a little cracker?” from behind me in the car. I hadn’t realised how used I was to actually conversing with him until his cold messed up his enunciation enough to make me constantly ask him to repeat himself, or guess at what he was saying (incorrectly, of course, to everyone’s frustration).

When he sees someone playing an instrument on TV or something about the music we’re listening to catches him, he runs up to me and says, “Mama, I need my cello. Can you get it, please?” And he is convinced that because HRH works at a school and takes a bus there he must take a school bus, so he waves at school buses during the day and says, “Bye bye Dada on a school bus! Back tonight!”.

Over the past month we’ve acquired some new favourite books, such as Robert Munsch’s Mud Puddle, Marjorie Flack’s Angus and the Cat, and Leo Lionni‘s Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse, the latter two being among my own childhood favourites. We’re also reading a lot of Thomas and the Great Race, concerning which I must admit that I was feeling snarky when I read it to him for the first time, and so when we got to the part where Thomas passed Bertie in the race I said “Ha, ha!” in a rather sarcastic way. Now Liam says “Ha, ha!” every time we read that page. I am somewhat ashamed, but also highly amused. I found a second-hand copy of Jeremy’s Decision for him recently and he loves it too, probably because it has both conducting and dinosaurs in it. He enjoys conducting, especially to the theme music of Music & Company in the mornings.

We began introducing him to Hayao Miyazaki films this last month. He watched My Neighbour Totoro, riveted and speechless until Totoro had first been encountered. Then he started suggesting places where Mei and her sister could look for him: “Where Totoro? Maybe… in a tree? Maybe… in a bus?”. We draw lots of Totoros and cat buses now, and look for soot sprites in the back garden. He usually ‘catches’ one in the lavender and runs to show me, palms together like Mei in the film, but when he reaches me he opens his palms and looks and says, “Oh no, it gone!” in astonishment. I love the imaginative re-enactment that goes on at this age. Sandman7 kindly gave us a copy of the Totoro soundtrack and it has replaced Cars as Liam’s score of choice when we travel. He really enjoyed Kiki’s Delivery Service too, which has reinforced his fascination with broom-riding and has given him the new word ‘dirigible’. His caregiver showed him the It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown at Hallowe’en and for a while he kept saying, “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that? It’s the Great Pumpkin!” And he ran around the house with a towel over his head saying “Where’s Linus?” for a while, too.

We don’t watch much TV, but Saturday mornings are a time to laze a bit and watch some fun stuff for an hour as we play. While watching the new line-up on Kids’ CBC a couple of weeks ago we happened to see Bo on the Go, and it has quickly become Liam’s favourite TV show. And thank goodness it has grown on HRH and I as well, because Liam had only seen it twice, a week apart, and then one night at dinner he looked at his arm and saying, “Uh-oh, I need more energy” just like the protagonist does. (We are very aware that this kid is an incredible sponge.) We bless Bo, however, because we have convinced him that his cough syrup is yellow energy juice and so he takes it despite the not-so-great taste and even claps at the end of the dose. Kids’ CBC is great, thank goodness, so on the days when we allow him some TV in the mornings for some reason there’s always something decent on. Liam enjoys the web site, too, for the games. He’s learning how to click things, but it’s Flash-animated and he sometimes clicks the right mouse button instead of the left and is taken to the Adobe Flash info page, which frustrates him.

He asked for soup the other day. Hello? I thought. You do not like soup; you can’t keep it on a spoon and it frustrates you. But after watching Remy make soup in Ratatouille (yet another film he watched this month for the first time) he ran into the kitchen and asked for soup with great excitement. So I paused the movie, opened a can of mushroom soup and took out a spoonful, whisked it with some milk, and warmed it up. And he sat and ate half of it quite adroitly, saying “Mmmm!” after every bite. Until he got a chunk of mushroom on the spoon, that is; then he said “Bleah!” and cheerfully announced that he was all finished. Other adventures in the kitchen include helping me bake or cook, which is fun but frustrating, too, because he grabs things and throws them into the bowl before they’re needed or spoons things out of the bowl onto the counter. “No Mama, I stirring — this Liam’s spoon,” he insists, until I get another wooden spoon of my own to use while he uses the first one. While making cracker dough yesterday he discovered the wooden mortar and pestle that I use to crush dried spices for cooking, which interested him. He insisted on using the rolling pin, too, alternating the rolling part with making marks with the end of the handles on the dough. (It was cracker dough; I wasn’t overly concerned about it toughening up through enthusiastic abuse.) While playing with the rolling pin he saw the picture that accompanied the magazine article with the recipe in it, and pointed to it with great excitement. “Look Mama, I rolling — just like in the picture!”

His fine motor skills are improving in general. His colouring and drawing are getting more focused, and he’s going great guns with real cardboard puzzles that have between fifteen and twenty-five pieces. What was a frustrating challenge two months ago is now much easier for him, as he looks at the bits of pictures on the pieces and matches them up. In fact, we got him a new one on Saturday, then picked up another one on Sunday while we were out and about. The hardest thing for him to do with the puzzles he has is to open the boxes!

The big-boy bed thing is going very well. We did have to put a doorknob cover on his door last week to prevent him from escaping at odd hours, but that was a very recent development and although it’s always on now as a precaution he doesn’t try to open the door very often. It’s funny to hear him slip out of bed sometimes after we’ve turned the lights out, pad to the door, try the handle, and say, “Oh, it’s lock’d” in his funny precise enunciation, as if he was just checking. Last night we took the bed rail off the open side of the bed, too, at his request ( “Please, Dada, I would like it down, this down, please, off bed, for me and Bun-Bun.”). He didn’t fall out, and it makes it a lot easier to tuck him in.

The changing seasons provide lots of interesting things for him to talk about, too. “Too dark!” he says a lot when we go out to the car in the late afternoon, now that Daylight Saving Time is over. And with November come scads of leaves dropping from our huge maple tree. Our driveway has a bit of a slope to it, so the leaves tend to collect near the garage. This delights Liam no end, because he gets to ‘run in the leafs’, kicking them around and scuffling his feet through them. And we must be the only family on the block who imports leaves into their backyard. On a walk around the block last week HRH and Liam came across a huge pile of leaves someone had raked to the edge of the sidewalk and Liam insisted on running through them, then picking up a few armfuls and dumping them into the wagon to bring home. He threw them on the grass in the backyard with great enjoyment. As the weather gets chillier the street hockey games are increasing in number, too. A couple of weeks ago we went out on a Saturday and the kids next door were playing in the driveway. Liam paused for a moment, mouth open as he watched the five year old twins taking slapshots at their adolescent brother in the net. Absolutely starry-eyed, he walked right into the middle of the game, reaching for the teenager’s stick. We scooped him up to allow the boys to play and he wailed; he wanted to play too. We finally got him a tiny set of sticks and whiffle balls, and he loves them so much he carried one around while we did errands last weekend.

For some reason Liam is suddenly very interested in robots. Last week he emptied his two-foot-high mesh laundry basket and pulled it over his head. “Are you a robot?” I asked. “Yes!” he said with great pride. He is a big fan of the song Robot Parade from the They Might Be Giants No! album. (Invisible: your place as Liam’s favourite band has been usurped by TMBG, I’m afraid.) He is also very interested in superheroes. I can’t remember what prompted it (certainly not The Incredibles) but one day he ran into his room and insisted I find a ‘super-cape’ for him. I tied a sheet around his neck. Then he insisted I have one too, and we jumped around the living room for a while being superheroes. He gallops around the house with his broom between his legs too, saying ‘Fly! Fly! Fly!’, and it’s a big treat to have HRH actually pick him up and zoom him around the house on it.

Baby Tallis is now recognised as a member of the Preston-LeBlanc clan: he asked me to draw her this morning. We showed him her pictures from the hospital and right away he said, “That Liam!” And yes, in his experience, he’s the only baby he knows who has slept in one of the baby aquariums, so the self-identification was understandable. I know he’s going to love meeting her, once the cold is officially finished.

Watching him play pretend and re-enact things he’s seen somewhere is wonderful. If I cut a finger or he stomps on my foot and I say “Ouch!”, he turns around, pats my shoulder and says, “It’s okay, Mama”, which is what I say to him if he trips or misses a turn while running down the hallway. Sometimes he’ll take our faces in his hands and turn them in his direction, saying, “Look at me” the way we do to him when we’re trying to communicate something important. And while we get spontaneous flying hugs all the time, now we get spontaneous kisses, too: he’ll creep up to us and lean over to kiss an arm, a knee, our hair, then go back to what he was doing before. It’s very special and just what we need sometimes to brush away the general exhaustion.

Hallowe’en!

That Hallowe’en costume I said I’d do for Liam for his benefit?

It was a major hit with the boy this morning. We showed him the shirt and a small smile flitted across his face. He touched the logo gently and said, “Incredibles?” Then he enthusiastically helped take off his Nemo jammies and get the shirt on, and even was very interested in getting the ‘super-pants-socks’ on. Not bad for an iron-on transfer, a pair of black woollen tights, and a pair of red socks with the foot part cut off. It won’t win any prizes, but he adores it, which is what counts.

Perhaps there will be a better photo later. He wouldn’t sit still this morning. (Naturally!)

Twenty-Eight Months Old!

Today is a momentous day: Liam and HRH removed the front rails of the crib this morning, to make him a real bed.

He scrambled right up onto it and said, “A bed!” Then I pulled out the Nemo spread I bought him months ago in anticipation of this day, unfolded it and said, “Who’s this on your new blanket?” He leapt off the bed and stood taking it in with a slightly open mouth for a moment, then said “Nemo” in quiet, reverent tones. I put it on the bed and he threw himself back on to test it out. “Liam on a Nemo bed!” he said, and went to find his favourite toys to pile on it. Every once in a while as he played he’d say, “Oh, nice bed!” in a casual way as if he’d just noticed it. We’ll see how bedtime goes tonight. HRH was a little sad last night when we confirmed that we’d be doing this as planned today. I’m relieved, because I frequently have to lift Liam in and out of the crib many times every day because he wants to play in it. This way he can do the climbing in and out himself. I don’t anticipate any major problems in keeping him in bed at night; it’s so exciting for him that I think he’ll want to stay there on his own.

Lately when we’ve put him in his crib at night and turned out the light he would say “Too dark! Turn on light!”, which was ironic to me because he was the one insisting on sleeping in the blanket tent that HRH made for him over half the crib. If you want more light, come out of the tent, kid! There’s plenty of light being cast by the aquarium. So we’d turn the overhead light back on and turn the dimmer down almost as far as it would go, then turn it out completely once he was asleep. This will no longer be a problem, because he hasn’t requested the tent back up now that the crib is a bed.

He woke up at six the other morning, pointed outside and said, “Too dark! Turn on light!” I said, “I can turn on the light inside, but I can’t turn it on outside. The sun isn’t up yet.” He looked surprised. “Sun not up yet?” Then he pondered for a moment. “Maybe… call sun? SUUUUUUN! WHERE ARE YOU, SUN! COME OUT!” The sun isn’t the only thing he’s called. A few weeks ago HRH and Liam were on the back deck watching a storm roll in. The sky was dark and the wind was tossing trees around, and lightning was flashing with thunderous accompaniment but it wasn’t raining quite yet. I was in the kitchen and I could hear them talking. Suddenly HRH bundled Liam inside. “Raining?” I said. “No,” said HRH. “My son leaned on the railing, held his arms out to the storm and said, ‘Thunder lightning, come play with Liam!'” As some of you may know, HRH has a certain sympathy (empathy?) with weather, and having experienced first-hand what being next to a lightning strike is like, he chose to curtail the suggested playdate.

Our big TV died some time ago, and two weeks ago we re-acquired our smaller oak-cased television from the upstairs neighbours. We went out and bought a rabbit-ear antenna, and voila! Reliable DVD watching! Plus we get CBC and CTV and Global, which means the Tudors, Heroes, and House for us, and — the best of all for Liam — the Doodlebops again. But really, just having a reliable television for movie-watching is such a relief. We put movies on to relax, and having a screen that flickered and shrank unpredictably was decidedly not relaxing. His favourite film is still currently Lilo & Stitch, although he’s been asking for “Woody Buzz” again recently, and once a week he’ll ask for Peter and Benjamin or the mice (also known as the World of Beatrix Potter series. Music-wise he’s still big on the Cars soundtrack, but here again he’s been asking for “Woody Roundup”, which is what he calls the Toy Story 2 soundtrack.

Two weeks ago he came and sat on my lap to watch the third movement of Beethoven’s cello sonata in A minor with piano accompaniment (as played by Leonard Rose and Glenn Gould — YouTube is incredibly useful sometimes). He became very excited, said “Liam play piano!” and thwacked enthusiastically at the laptop keyboard, sending the semi-colon key spinning off into the air. It’s kind of hard to be mad at a child for being passionate about music. I brought out the viola for him the other day and he gasped with delight, clapped his hands, and said “Liam make music!” I love that he gets so excited about it. Eventually he’ll love it in a less physically violent fashion and I won’t have to run interference.

When Liam wants to do something he’ll suggest it, and generally, because life tends to be a series of crushing defeats for a two year old, the answer is no. So sometimes he’ll deliberately ask for a list of things he knows can’t happen, in a veiled effort to get to something reasonable that we will, he imagines, agree to with relief and enthusiasm. “Go outside?” he’ll say. “It’s too wet, Liam.” “Watch… Woody Buzz?” “It’s too early to watch movies, Liam.” “Go see Nana Grandad?” “It’s too far, Liam.” “Go bookstore?” “The bookstore isn’t open.” “Go see… lobsters?” And he has a look on his face that says, ‘You see, I am not dim, I have cleverly herded you into my crafty trap, you cannot POSSIBLY say no to driving to the grocery store because we ALWAYS need something from the grocery store and while we’re there we can stop by the fish counter for, oh, half an hour so I can watch the live lobsters.’ The first time he said it I nearly choked because I laughed so hard at the unexpected appearance of crustaceans on his list.

He loves to play tea-time with his tea set, and now we frequently have a pretend tea session after his pyjamas are on and before we curl up to read stories at bedtime. “Oh, tea!” he exclaims and scrambles to get the tea tray, pouring pretend tea in an enthusiastic (if not tidy) way into the little red teacup, tossing it back before saying “Mama tea! and pouring me a cup. Once we’ve sipped, he says “Oh sugar!“, and we go through the spooning of pretend sugar into our cups. Then I inevitably have to look under the dresser for the little cream pitcher, and we do it again, and then HRH gets his cup too. His pretending is becoming more complex by the day. Liam picked up a block last week and waved it around in the air making whooshing noises. “Rocket!” he said to me and ran around the room with it, still making the happy whooshing noise. Then yesterday he picked up a helicopter toy and waved it around. “Harold flying with Buzz!” he said. This interested me because Harold is a helicopter character from the Thomas the Tank Engine world, while Buzz Lightyear is a character from a Pixar film, and he was imagining Buzz was there. When he takes a bath he plays with two plastic turtles and a Little People treasure chest, and the turtles pretend to eat what’s in the chest. “Turtles eating… oatmeal,” he’ll say. “Nom nom nom!” The turtles eat for a while, and then he says, “Turtles eating… sausage!” (That’s one magic chest: not only does it serve up any kind of food the turtles wish to eat, it appears to be a never-ending supply as well. Disguised as gold coins and various other piratey treasure too, I might add.)

He reads voraciously, on his own as well as with us. Mortimer, Murmel Murmel Murmel, and The Incredible Book-Eating Boy are all still frequent bedtime requests. He’s added The Cat In The Hat Comes Back to his Seuss favourites, too. He points at words while we’re out and about sometimes and says, “Letters!”, although he doesn’t voluntarily identify them very often. He frequently counts to ten, and sometimes goes beyond, but after ten there’s no guarantee they’ll come in correct order. He likes to touch the magnetic letters on the fridge, then knock them all down, saying “Chicka chicka boom boom!“.

He grows every single day. People notice a difference when they haven’t seen him in a week. His head now comes up to my hip! We’ve given up on size 2T pants; size 3T is where we need to be now, because his legs are so long. Tops absolutely need to be 3T or larger because his 2T shirts show a little too much tummy! Shoes are between size 7 and 8, and he’s wearing at least 3X coats. He can climb just about any staircase, and walk down them too if he’s holding someone’s hand. Afternoon naps range between an hour and a half to two and a half hours long, and night sleeps are about eleven and a half hours long. Every day is an adventure; every day is fun. Even when I get frustrated, there’s something to appreciate or marvel at about him.

Twenty-Seven Months Old!

Somewhere inside that long enthusiastic body is my tiny tiny baby who had wires and tubes all over him for the first thirty days of his life. The boy who bounces off walls and floors without a pause and soaks up damage like a tank is the same child who was in neo-natal intensive care for two weeks, and confined to a hospital room for five, over half of it in an incubator. Now Liam throws himself over rocks and up cement blocks, goes headlong over swings and wagons, falls down stairs when he isn’t watching where he feet are going. He can climb in and out of the car by himself. His fine motor skills are growing with leaps and bounds too; for example, he can assemble his semi-trailer truck out of Lego-like connecting blocks without help now, holds crayons and pencils correctly, and eats very tidily with forks and spoons. He likes to help me bake and cook, pouring measured ingredients into a bowl and stirring them.

I want to laugh every time Liam glances up and gives a casual “Oh, hi, Mama” when I walk into the room, as if he’s mildly surprised to see me. He’s using ‘I’ a lot more now. “Oh, I see!”, “I get it!”, and “I do it” are all frequently heard. He helped HRH wash the car the other day, and had great fun. “Dada Liam washing the car!” he said over and over. Dropping the wet cloths into the bucket of soapy water was the best part, I think: he’d drop them in and say “Splash!” very happily. Then he’d pull them out and watch them drip. “Water running!” he said, watching it trickle down the driveway to the drain. He ran in and out of the spray when HRH used the hose to rinse the car off. “Raining, raining!” he chortled. He’d helped HRH water the plants in the front garden the day before, too, and spent a lot of the time trying to drink the spray of water.

The “Where’s Liam?” game has now developed a sequel of sorts. Now after hiding a toy he suggests places where he may have hidden it (which we can plainly see). Now the amused “Noooooo!” line in the game is ours, given when he suggests that Thomas is in an outlandish place like the ceiling fan when he’s actually behind a cup of milk on the table. He has also begun playing a sleeping game, where he closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep (complete with deep breathing!), then says with his eyes still shut, “Wake up, Liam!” before bouncing up and grinning. If someone has their eyes closed, they must be asleep and woken up by a perky toddler. (Dr Seuss characters frequently have their eyes shut in a sort of smug contentment, leading Liam to tell them to “Wake up!” a lot.)

His appetite ranges from eating a pile of food that must be bigger than his stomach to having two bites of rice at dinner and declaring himself to be all finished. He rejected salmon sashimi a couple of days ago; maybe that first time was a fluke. (No pun intended.)

His toddler worldview comprising people and their identification fascinates me. I am Mama; HRH is Dada. All other fathers are Daddy and all other mothers are Mummy. He enthusiastically lines up to give goodbye hugs and kisses to other kids’ parents when they drop their progeny off with the caregiver. (Hey, free hugs and kisses? He is so there! I’m not sure if it’s to give them or get them. Probably both.)

We have to read Green Eggs & Ham at least once before bedtime. Murmel Murmel Murmel and Mortimer by Robert Munsch have become quick favourites too. He had Mortimer’s bedtime song down pat the second time we read it. Three days ago he became fixated on the Cat in the Hat for some odd reason; he’s never read it at the caregiver’s, nor here. But one night he pulled it out of the bookcase and said “Cat! Hat! Read!” and climbed up into my lap. He’s begun reciting books to me at odd times and in odd places. All of a sudden he’ll be looking at me, repeating dialogue or narrative from some part of a story, with no obvious trigger or inspiration. “Go woods lane, but no McGregor garden, I am going out,” he said yesterday morning, looking at me very seriously. “Eat lettuce, green beans, radishes, feeling parsley.” He’s told the end of Arthur’s Pet Business several times, and has randomly recited bits of Green Eggs and Ham as well. New and fun books this month include The Incredible Book Eating Boy and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, which is of course too old right now but very enjoyable for the parents.

He’s also begun to sing along with songs from soundtracks a lot more clearly, especially his beloved Cars soundtrack. (Yes, it’s still “Riding in the car, listening to Cars music again okay, yes?” when we get ready to go out somewhere.) It’s hilarious to hear him say “Route 66!” along with Chuck Berry, and touching to hear him sing the last half of phrases when listening to James Taylor’s heartbreaking Our Town.

Last month we went to visit the Exporail train museum in St-Constant on a lovely sunny day, and Liam was terribly excited. We went first thing in the morning when it opened, which was ideal because there weren’t many people in our way. He ran up and down the platforms of the display shed, ducked in and out of vintage cars and engines, and was generally thrilled to bits. We took a ride on a tram that went around the site, and a ride on the miniature railway. Liam came home with a train whistle, which thankfully isn’t very loud, and we have promised to take him back this fall so that we can explore the open reserve rolling stock and the century-old restored train station. We’ve added to his collection of toy Thomas trains too, buying him the Annie and Clarabel coach set for his little Thomas to pull. Liam was thrilled, but then got very upset because they wouldn’t attach together with both their faces facing forward. He cried and cried because they wouldn’t ‘click’, as he calls it. In his toddler worldview, all faces should point in the same direction. This is how he taught himself the right way to connect his engines: the magnet at the back of something connected to the magnet at the front of the next one. Annie and Clarabel are different, and I finally got him to come cuddle with me on the chesterfield with his big book of Thomas poetry while I read him the Annie and Clarabel poem, reading the bit about how they travel back to back very clearly, Annie looking forward and Clarabel seeing where they had been. We read it over and over and over, sometimes flipping to another poem then back again, until he slid down and went and picked them up, and clicked them together back to back, just as they’re designed to do. And from that moment everything was fine and dandy, and he insists on sleeping with them. He just needed some help thinking it through.

We’ve introduced the concept of the time out at home. Liam’s had a couple of these at the caregiver’s house when he’s pushed someone or thrown something, but we haven’t needed to do it at home until the other day when he pushed Maggie sharply off a chair. HRH scooped him up and strode to the kitchen,where we pulled a chair over and sat him down facing the wall, telling him sternly he was not to push the cat, and that he was going to sit there for one minute. We left and he began to cry, but he didn’t move till we went back for him. Yesterday morning we had to do it again for the same reason, and although he slipped off the seat he stood there, one hand on the chair, still crying; he didn’t move beyond that. I went back, held his face in my hands, and asked him if he knew why he was there. Liam nodded, his eyes bright with tears, and said, “Yes: no no, no push Maggie.” I kissed him and picked him up, and we went to find the poor cat who’d been tossed off the back of the recliner chair. She was asleep on the bed, so we sat down next to her and he petted her once or twice, barely touching her. Then he pulled his hand back and said very clearly, without prompting, “I sorry, Maggie.” He forgets how strong he is when he cuddles her, and we sometimes have to jump to rescue her because he’s strangling her or bending her in odd ways in his enthusiasm. We explain to him repeatedly that Maggie is old and can’t play the way he’d like her to. And yet she’s generally fine with him, letting him pet her and play with her tail and her feet and her ears, laying his head on her as he lies next to her on our bed. “Liam and Maggie sleeping,” he says, so very happy because he is lying down with her. I don’t know what we’ll do when she finally passes on; Nix and Cricket won’t have anything to do with him.

He woke up screaming last night at two in the morning — not crying, actually screaming. It took an hour and a half to get him back to sleep. Every time he was limp and relaxed I’d try to slip him into the crib and he would scream again. I have no idea what happened; we assume he had a nightmare. I read him a couple of stories, and we cuddled and dozed for a long time. I could tell he was tired because he kept saying random things dreamily as he rested his head on my shoulder and stared unseeing across the room. One of them was, “Flying. He’s flying.” (Who? I wondered. “Is he happy?” I asked, just to make sure Liam wasn’t talking about the nightmare. “Mm-hm,” was the answer.) Another was “Purple?” Later he said, “Baby feet.” In the end I put him back in bed for the sixth time, kissed him, and stepped out of his room as he began to scream my name over and over. I stood just on the other side of the door and rested my head against the door frame until he finally quieted down and passed out. I wish he could tell me what had happened, what he dreamed to make him so terrified of getting back into the crib. He fought naptime for two and a half hours today, screaming for me over and over and over when we put him in bed. He worked himself up so much that he fell out of the crib lunging for me as I opened the door to check on him. He went head first into his laundry basket, so there was a soft landing, but still — something has really spooked him, and he can’t tell us what it is. He has become such a wonderful communicator that I had all but forgotten how helpless I could feel, as I did when he was an infant and we were trying to figure out how to calm him the one or two times he really had a fit about something. I think we’ve all been taking the excellent communication for granted, and we’ve forgotten that sometimes deep-seated terror or need or emotion can’t be framed in words, especially not by a two year old. He feels so deeply, and is usually so happy-go-lucky that to see him struggle with this is heartbreaking. All will be well eventually, of course. But for now we’re reminded of the more challenging parts of being a child.