Category Archives: Photographs

What We Did On The First Sunday Of August

Ever since I can remember, the first Sunday in August has been the Highland Games.

I’ve remembered it too late to schedule it in over recent years, or we’ve been busy, but this year we made it. We packed up both godfamiles, and off we all went for an afternoon out in the gorgeous sun. There wasn’t a spot of humidity anywhere, and there was a decent breeze, thank goodness.

HRH wore his kilt — of course — and Liam wore the tiny kilt that my grandfather got for me from Edinburgh when I was a wee little thing. They stopped a lot of traffic.

Liam loved the massed bands; he loved the drums and the pipes (not a surprise at all, considering his heritage and the cousins who play both); he loved all the dogs he saw; he smiled at and charmed just about everyone he met. He reached for a total stranger to cuddle with her, but it was fine, because it turned out that she was the wife of one of the members of Salty Dog, a local Celtic band that HRH used to hang out with lo these many years ago. And she was more than happy to cuddle him a bit before heading off to the beer tent where the band was striking up. He absolutely was not interested in napping, or eating that much; too much to see! to do! to hear! The one thing he wasn’t happy about was the cannon that was part of the opening ceremonies. He’d been fine through the display of musketfire, but when they fired the cannon he was looking the other way. The sudden sharp sound surprised him more than anything else, so there was a bit of angry crying. But after he’d cuddled with each of us and had a bit more milk, he was fine and interested in the bands marching onto the field.

I came home with badly sunburned shoulders, despite the amount of sunscreen I slathered on before departure. But apart from that, it was a wonderful wonderful day, one of the best I’ve had in a while. The massed bands at the opening ceremonies were, as always, worth the $10 admission fee alone. And it felt really special to bring my son to his first games, as I’d been brought to too many to count while growing up.

Liam Update

Almost a full two months after the fact, there are finally pictures from Liam’s birthday weekend up:


Liam’s First Birthday Weekend Extravaganza!

You may notice the page looks a little different from the earlier photo albums. Someday I’ll get around to recoding the old ones to match the new design and the new site. You know, in all that spare time I have.

Liam Pictures

We had a fun afternoon with my parents yesterday. Again, it was a bit hard to get into the rhythm of the day; one wants to relax yet one’s brain is also saying, “But they’re leaving in a couple of hours, we should be doing things!”

Liam’s always doing things, though, as illustrated by these photos taken by my father:

Sparky: Thirteen Months Old

This morning, the new word was “ilk” while showing me his bottle. Yikes. I’m going to start losing track of them all soon.

While nursing Liam this morning, I was thinking about what I was doing one year ago today. It was July 11 2005 when I carried my suitcase into the hospital to stay 48 hours on-site with Liam, so that the nurses could make sure we knew what to do with a baby, and to ensure that we wouldn’t break one another during full-time use. And I remembered being upset when Liam was hungry, trying to nurse in the middle of the night and crying his heart out, and we eventually figured out it was because I had too much milk for him to get a proper latch. Yes, we wouldn’t have this problem today, because the kid’s so enthusiastic he’d go through anything to get milk. But this is now; that was then, when he was a bare 4 lb 12 oz and I was producing an insane amount of milk because I’d been pumping for a month.

No, nursing is very different these days. I phased out the night pumping session about two months ago, and stopped the morning session at the end of June, as the bottles he gets now are few and far between and I still have a small freezer stash. He gets to nurse when winding down for a nap, and this past week he’s also been asking to nurse for five or ten minutes in the morning after he gets up and has played in the living room for a bit, even after he’s had half his cup of milk to drink on his own along with a snack of Cheerios. This past month he’s developed a tendency towards gymnastics when he nurses. He rolls around to get comfortable, tries to stand up, and basically squirms all over the place. This morning I finally sat him down on the chesterfield next to me, facing the back of it, and let him lean over a bit towards me to nurse that way. It seemed to work.

One of his favourite games is peekaboo (of course), and he never gets tired of it. When he decides to take a break from dinner he pulls the dish towel on his lap up and holds it over his face. Whereas before he’d pull it down again almost immediately and laugh, now he’ll wait a good long time while we wonder where he is before dropping the towel and grinning at us with that wonderful open-mouth grin he has. Not only does he hide his own face, he’ll reach forward and cover our faces, then pull the towel down and be delighted to see us. If we cover our faces with our hands, he’ll pull the hands away, then push them back to start the sequence over again. He tried to do it with Maggie, but she wasn’t interested in playing.

The obsession with putting small things into bigger things continues. The Fisher Price school bus makes an excellent Cheerio taxi, he has discovered. Food on the go. Snacks for busy babies and their toys. It’s the next big thing.

I mentioned the walking. The shelves have now become a climbing challenge. Liam will pile toys into his toy basket and step on them to get a better angle from which to reach the next shelf up. He’s also beginning to move furniture, if it’s light enough. He can move the coffee table, and the rocking chair. He also figured out how to open the glass doors beneath the television that house the electronics. We push the coffee table up against them, but now that he can move it when he sets his mind to it, who knows how long that will last? He loves opening the drawers in the kitchen and pulling my measuring cups and spoons out. The baking pans on the open bottom shelf are his toys too, as are the pot lids we keep in the stove drawer. It’s fascinating to watch him develop his own little games and ways of doing things. Not as fascinating is his recent exploration of high-volume screeching, just for the heck of it.

Bathtime is still awesome fun. He dunks his face in water at least twice a week. My in-laws had him dunking his feet in their pool last week, and he loved it. He had fun pulling handfuls of petals off the adjacent geraniums and tossing them into water to watch them float, too. ( “Thank goodness for skimmers,” said HRH.) At home he loves his sandbox, but he seems to have developed a dislike of the swing, which is unfortunate because we did get that swingset. It will still be there when he decides he likes swinging again.

His hair is long enough to start forming into little curls at the base of his neck. When he wakes up from a nap it’s in cowlicks all over his head, and I have to wet it to get it to lie flat. It’s so light and fine, with a brownish red sheen to it. A haircut is ages off, though, thank goodness. His eyes are now definitely dark green and I love them, because I was hoping he’d end up with green eyes. His naps are going well enough in that he still has them, but they’re getting shorter. Now the max is around an hour and a quarter. He’s still sleeping about ten to twelve hours at night, though. If I didn’t feel so dead at the end of his day I’d probably appreciate it even more.

I already journaled about one of the hand signs Liam makes. He has two others which are similar but separate. He waves at people and things to say hi or bye, sometimes with the associated word (sometimes even if they’re not arriving or departing!). He also has a similiar version of the point “more/give it to me” hand action, where he just opens and closes his fist in a direction, which means “that way” or “over there”. When I ask him where a specific toy is, such as “Where’s your bus?” he turns around and makes the sign at it. This morning I saw him put his palm to his mouth, hand flat, while he made eye contact with me, but I don’t know if he’s trying to blow kisses or tell me that he’s hungry. We’ll figure that one out within the next day or so.

As for food, he pretty much eats everything now. Pasta with meat sauce is very fun. He’ll eat a whole banana or pear or apple in one sitting as a snack, with a side serving of Cheerios or crackers and a good five ounces of beverage. He drinks milk, orange juice, apple juice, and water. He had steak with us again the other day at my in-laws’ house, and chewed on the bone, as well as nibbling some of my early birthday cake. (Chocolate! Yum!)

He’s got a place in a home daycare run by a woman I’ve seen care for a child over two years, and I’m excited about it. He’ll have so much fun! He’ll be starting with one day a week to ease into it (and give me that one day I need to get work done while my mother in law is out of town!), and then go to two so that I’ll have the time I’ll need to write whichever book gets contracted next. I’m looking forward to it, but I’m also a little sad, because I know that no matter how tired or annoyed I am at the end of a bad day with him, I’ll still miss him when he’s not here. It’s good to miss him, though, because it reminds me of how much I appreciate him. I don’t like being fed up at the end of a trying day, nor do I ever want to reach a point where I resent him because I haven’t been able to get my work done. I know there are millions of mothers who do the full-time at-home thing all over the world, and who’ve done it for aeons, but this is my family right here and now, our personalities, my son who loves people and likes constant interaction, and my work that I love doing. I think this flexible solution is ideal right now, with the option to keep him home if I like, or to ask if the caregiver can take him an extra day or afternoon if a deadline requires it. I don’t have to choose between my son or my job, and I’m thankful for that. I can have both, and it’s a blessing.

I love him. He’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. And I think he’s pretty darn lucky to have us as parents, too.

Cellists Don’t Count

Last night I went out with some other Band People (TM) to the Montreal Musician and Musical Instrument Show. Since three quarters of the exhibitors were luthiers, I was looking forward to seeing, if not actually playtesting, some electric cellos. In particular, Vector Instruments, a Nova Scotian maker of electric instruments of the violin family, was going to be there. I’d been researching their stuff recently, and if no one else had anything, at least they would. And I was in the mood to mess about with one. This is a big thing — it takes me a while to psych myself up to test instruments, particularly in public places.

There were a grand total of — wait for it — zero cellos there. Anywhere, in any of the rooms or halls. Traditional or otherwise. There were violins (trad and electric), basses (ditto), but if you’re a cellist, you apparently have no place anywhere in or around the jazz festival.

I wasn’t as bothered about it there as I was by the time I got home. Thinking about it on the metro made it worse, for some reason.

On the other hand, there were a surprising number of saxophones, flutes, clarinets, and accordions among the other expected string instruments. There were bassoons, for heaven’s sake. And drum kits being played by four and five year olds who had better coordination than I could demonstrate in the same situation. I had fun watching them, and looking at the beautiful beautiful work-of-art guitars, and watching Jan and the Baron play pretty things, and hanging out with everyone’s mother’s favourite guitarist and Ceri until the show closed.

The one piece of information I gathered that was directly applicable to my instrument was from the reps for Schatten Design, Canadian makers of pickups for various acoustic instruments, specifically the cello pickup. The reps were informative and friendly, and promised me a money-back guarantee if I tried it out and didn’t like it. They also told me that if I ordered it within the next week and mentioned that I’d talked to them at the exhibition, they’d ship it to me free of charge. It’s fifty dollars more than the ubiquitous Fishman C-100 pickup, but I’m more inclined to test it because of the support offered by the makers. Part of my resistance to the Fishman comes from the fact that it’s what the local guitar salespeople try to sell me, and they know guitars, not cellos, so when I ask them for more details they can’t tell me anything but keep trying to sell it to me irregardless. (Yes, yes, I know, it’s my birthday soon, and I’m not buying anything for myself until it’s well past, just in case someone has taken it into their head to do something extravagant. More evidence proving that I can learn.) And the Schatten is Canadian, too; I like that.

And because I’ve had several less than stellar days in a row, here is a terrific picture of Liam that makes me laugh every time I see it. I hope it brightens your afternoon as well, in the last hour before the weekend arrives!

Twelve Months Old — Happy First Birthday, Liam!

New word as of this morning: “Fish.” He said it to the aquarium this morning, often. He said it when we came to the fish page in his new pets book. Can you tell the new aquarium is a hit? He was kissing it yesterday. He won’t stop waving at them.

One year ago, it was swelteringly hot, dreadfully humid, and I had a baby after only thirty-one weeks of pregnancy. Now we have a strong, bright, bouncy one year old boy, the temperature is half the seasonal average, and we had about fifteen millimeteres of rain yesterday. We made sure we had that swingset and the sandbox on purpose for the party. And in theory, it was a lovely idea. Ah well.

I’ve heard that first birthday parties can go one of two ways: badly, or really well. Ours went really well. We are so proud of how confidently Liam handled himself. He was cheerful, played well, had fun, and demonstrably appreciated the physical gifts he was given. (And he will appreciate the paper gifts that are going into his RESP in the future, I’m sure, and we appreciate them deeply in the meantime!) Tal arrived bearing a bunch of balloons, which proceeded to delight every single child over the course of the afternoon and features in about eighty percent of the photos because they got tied to the coffee table in the middle of the room. First foods were some carrot cupcake, half a cookie with icing that he scrounged from an abandoned plate (at least I hope it was abandoned; anyone, if the half-cookie iced in green that you left vanished, now you know who stole it), and green grapes. (Yes, well, it was a party; we kind of gave up on controlling the first foods one at a time. Besides, other than the grapes, I made everything myself, so I knew exactly what was in it.) And he ate dinner afterwards, and nursed to sleep just fine, and slept a normal night, too. Thank you to everyone who came over to make it a special day, especially Matthieu, Teela, and Devon! We’ll have a family BBQ sometime later in the summer so everyone can enjoy the swings and sandbox when the weather’s better. And the food I’d made went over very nicely. There are no cheese biscuit things left, alas. Although I expected this, it’s still very sad. I’m glad I deliberately kept some of everything else away in containers to protect it for today’s family luncheon, otherwise I’d be serving Liam’s grandparents crumbs.

Liam is now in size 4 diapers, and size 4 shoes too I discovered when I bought him his first sandals last week. (Not that he’s been able to wear them since, but at least now we have them.) He shares everything with everyone, holding out food and toys and books to cats, people, and other toys. It’s a lovely phase, and we’re enjoying it very much, particularly since we know the next phase is the “Mine!” phase. He’s well over the 12 month size in most clothes, too, and looks more and more like a little boy instead of a baby. I bought a set of cloth diapers last week as well, something that I’ve been waiting to do until he moved into the toddler size, and they’ve gone over just fine. It’s relief to me, because I was squirming about the amount of landfill we were creating. When he was tiny we used biodegradable diapers, but then people started buying us a diaper supply and we kept using them. And then when his system stabilised enough to be predictable, he was so close to the toddler size that I decided to wait so we wouldn’t have to put away the infant size soon after we’d bought them.

His favourite band is Invisible. If we put the spring gig CD on and crank the volume up on Folsom Prison Blues (because really, how else does one listen to it? and then everything else just stays loud, which is also right and good) he grabs the edge of the table and boogies with a big grin on his face. (Have we mentioned that we can play Sheena Is A Punk Rocker and A D E on his piano/xylophone?) He loves it when we sing, particularly the Five Little Ducks song or the ABC song. For some reason, he’s not as big on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which is a good thing because I cannot remember to not sing “like a tea-tray in the sky” when the third line rolls around) or Baa Baa Black Sheep when we try to slip some variety into the lyrics.

He’s cruising all over the place, and can crawl faster than we can walk sometimes. He loves playing with the baking sheets and roasting tins in the kitchen. He waves at everything, all the time. He waved goodbye to some people yesterday, which was a first. He loves standing at the front window to watch the cars and people go by. When we walk down to the water, he’s fascinated by the birds. Wheels are still the coolest things in the world, be they stroller wheels or car wheels or wheels on his toys.

There’s more; there’s always more, but I always forget. I try to keep notes for the next monthly update, and they never seem to accurately reflect everything that’s going on. Words cannot capture the dynamic nature of the daily life of a one year old.


Liam says: Cheerios taste much better off the floor.