I think the fourteenth month of Liam’s life is going to be referred to as the Month Of Alarming Lexical Leaps And Bounds. This morning he pointed to Cricket and said “Keh-cat.” Back at eleven months he started saying “Gee-cat” to Maggie-Cat, so this is evidently his new name for Cricket-Cat.

I had a quiet birthday. Liam and I took the bus to the mall where we bought a hand-held vacuum (not a birthday present to myself, simply something I’d been meaning to pick up for a while), and you would have thought the people on the bus, and the bus itself, existed simply to entertain Liam. I think early afternoon trips will become the rule rather than the exception, because he refused to nap after lunch and did rather well for the two hours we were out instead. He would have napped soundly once we’d gotten home, too, if I hadn’t turned the damn handheld on, expecting it to be quieter than our monster of an upright. It’s just as loud, so it woke the boy up after only ten minutes of napping. He proceeded to not go back to sleep, not with nursing, not with rocking, not with quiet time in the crib. Argh.

My birthday gift from Kino Kid was an evening of babysitting to allow HRH and I to go out and see Superman Returns. I had a coupon for free admission on my birthday as well as a ten dollar gift certificate to cover HRH’s ticket, so we ended up just paying for our snacks (and yikes, we do that so rarely that I’d forgotten how overpriced they are). The film was very good. I loved the design of it. I could have walked out completely satisfied after the opening credit sequence. And casting Frank Langella as Perry White was a stroke of genius.

Apart from my night outside the house, I got a book I’d wanted for a while (thank you, Jeff and Paze!), and flowers (thank you, HRH!), cheques from my parents and my grandmother (thank you!) and birthday greetings via phone and various online journals (thank you, everyone!). And if there’s a group gift in the works, would someone please tell HRH so that he can know if he’s allowed to go ahead and buy me the main gift that he wants to give me?

Today we have company this afternoon in the form of ai731. Then I think we’re going to invest in a second smaller air conditioner tonight so that we can have one in the front and one in the back of the house, because the humidex is going to push our temperatures above forty degrees this weekend. But my birthday money is my own, and some of it is going to go towards a new stick of RAM, because I’m tired of my computer thinking so hard when I open photo programs or have anything running simultaneously with Windows Media Player.