Daily Archives: May 11, 2009

Forty-Seven Months Old!

A mere thirty-two days till he’s four years old. How time flies.

Spelling and reading continue apace. Typeset fonts (think Courier, for example) frustrate him. A typeset lowercase ‘a’ does not look like the lowercase ‘a’ he has been taught to draw by hand, nor does a ‘g’. He is very frustrated by this. Otherwise, words and letters are the most exciting things around these days. He writes his name on paper or the chalkboard all the time, or spells it aloud. He writes words in the air to see if we can identify them. (This is more of a challenge than it may sound. First of all, he’s more enthusiastic than precise, and second of all I’m reading it backwards.) We have discovered together that he very much likes copying words out, so I’ll print words and spell them out as I do, and he copies them onto another paper, spelling them out himself as he does. He’s done a few greeting cards this way. His drawing skills have leapt a couple of levels as well. He drew the first face I’ve seen him draw the other day, and he used the entire chalkboard instead of squeezing it into a corner, spacing the features out remarkably well. And last night he drew two different versions of WALL*E, both extremely recognizable. HRH is, naturally, bursting with pride.

The newest addition to the household is stuffed black rabbit with white paws, whom the boy saw on a post-Easter shelf at the drugstore we stopped at on the way out of Oakville. He instantly fell in love with him, and as it was half-price, I bought it for him. “What are you going to call him?” I asked on the way to the car. “His name is Blackie-Whitie,” Liam said with confidence. And he hasn’t put the darn thing down since that day. He’ll go all shy with people when they talk to him, but he’ll hold out the rabbit and say, “This is my new bunny, his name is Blackie-Whitie.” Sometimes he adds, “His nickname is Blackie,” just so everyone’s clear. Starting in the car on the way home from Easter, he has been saying, “Mama, you can cuddle Bun-Bun” and pushing Bun-Bun at me till I take him in the crook of my arm. We suspect he doesn’t want to hurt Bun-Bun’s feelings, which is very sensitive of him. Otherwise he drags Blackie, Bun-Bun, and the little white rabbit he called Peter until he got another tiny white bunny called Snowball/Blizzard, so the first white one is alternately Peter/Blizzard/Snowball, depending on what the tiny one is called that day) around in his arms at home, and negotiates bringing all three or five along for car rides. (One. He is allowed only one.) Blackie is now somewhat bedraggled. I mourn his silky clean fur.

(Yes, we’re fairly sure his main totem is a rabbit.)

There were two new movies this month. We finally got a copy of 101 Dalmatians on DVD (as well as the new sequel) and he went absolutely bananas over it. The rabbits were all renamed Pongo and Perdita, we played at being Dalmatians, every minivan that parked in the neighbourhood belonged to Horace and Jasper, and every car that went racing down the road and squealed around the corner was Cruella. Then Nightdemons lent us a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit, a very loose remake of the book’s story (which he knows), and he went crazy for that as well. Now we are told on a regular basis that someday, Blackie will be a Real Rabbit. Every morning he checks to see if it’s happened. We keep telling him it takes a long time and a lot of cumulative love.

The other big milestones this past month were the purchase of his first board game, Chutes & Ladders (apparently Snakes & Ladders, the UK version, is no longer available in Canada and thus we ended up with the rather preachy US one, hmph), and the purchase of his first set of gaming dice. He is very enthusiastic about Chutes & Ladders, only he thinks the chutes are preferable because in the playground doesn’t one climb a ladder to get to the more exciting slide part? And he chose a d20 from his new dice to roll for his first game, which made it rather short. (His next pick was a d4, which meant the second game was abandoned after taking forever to get anywhere.) So we are working through the inevitable tears when someone else wins (“But I wanted to win!”), and the concept of luck and random dice rolls, and the idea that it isn’t the end of the world if someone else wins; we just set the board up again and start anew. It’s the fun we have playing that counts.

When the boy is about to sing something (which is often these days; he is all about the singing), he lifts his fist to his mouth and clears his throat with a tiny soft sound. I have to try not to laugh every time. In the past week he has become obsessed with “Yellow Submarine,” which is both fortunate and not. It’s an easy song, so we know it and he learned it really quickly, but it’s not exactly deep. On the other hand, when I put our Beatles “1” CD on in the car the other day, he sighed contentedly and said, “This is my favourite music.” Not bad for a kid who’d only heard it once about a year ago.

He met t! and Jan’s year-old husky/shepherd/collie dog Carter over the weekend, and was throughly thrilled. Carter has experienced a streak of bad luck and has gone from a splint to a cast to another splint on his right foreleg, and is currently wearing a Victrola-style collar so the splint doesn’t get chewed. None of this fazed Liam. He giggled and crooned and patted and ruffled the dog’s fur all day. At once point the dog leaned against him with a deep sigh, pushing the boy into the wall, but after a look at HRH to make sure everything was still okay Liam set to scritching the blissful dog with great enthusiasm. At home after a long day, he was eating his grilled cheese sandwich when he said, “What was your favourite part of the day?” I told him what I’d enjoyed, and he said thoughtfully, “My favourite part of the day was meeting and playing with Carter.” And in fact, he has named the small stuffed dog he’s had for two years (previously known by the imaginative name of “Puppy”) Carter. Also while there, he spent a couple of hours jumping around the muddy side field as it was being prepared for the orchard, splashing in puddles, testing various bits of bark and grass and dead leaves to see what floated and what didn’t, and inspecting the family of baby field mice that was found as one of the holes was dug. When he came in for lunch, thoroughly soaked and happy, there were three inches of muddy water in each rainboot. If you can’t be a kid in a place like that, where can you be one?

Trees, People, Cello

Or, What My Weekend Was Like, By Me.

Saturday we trekked out to the wilds of North Stormont/Maxville to help t! and Jan dig and plant their orchard. A dozen heritage apples and other fruit trees were planted, each assigned to a different pagan friend. Everyone was invited to bless the tree they planted in whatever way they felt drawn to do so. Some blessings were elaborate; some were quiet; all were blessed with sweat and laughter. Despite assurances otherwise (and here absolutely NO ONE looks at HRH, no) it, well, it poured rain. (Except when HRH planted his tree. Ahem.) I’m a fan of rain, and it wasn’t even cold, but having trekked around after a wiggly four year old for a couple of hours and trying to keep him focused during the cumulatively long first half of the orchard, eventually agreeing to hold him on my hip while he snuggled his very wet head into my neck, took its toll on me. My blessing ended up being rushed because the boy decided he needed to use the bathroom again and we got back right when it was my turn. In the end I did nothing like what I’d prepared and pretty much just shoved the tree in the ground and told those with spades to fill the hole in. I had prepared a charged pebble that I tossed into the hole, though, and I’d brought a bottle of water blended from some Chalice Well water a friend had brought back from Glastonbury for me and a small vial of water blessed and charged at the last BFC Clan Camping I’d attended in 2004, which I poured on the ground once it was planted.

The boy’s tree was next, and he tossed his pebble into the hole. We reminded him that there was something he wanted to sing, so he announced that he had a special song to sing for his tree. “It’s a song we sing at school, and it is my favourite, and it’s about something that is under the water, and yellow,” he informed those gathered. HRH and I tried hard not to laugh as people realized what he meant, and I reminded him that no, he hadn’t planned to sing ‘Yellow Submarine,’ there was another song he’d been singing at home. So we chanted “Up and down, and sky and ground” together while those with spades filled the hole and covered the roots. It was pretty special. Then he stood looking at the base of the tree for a while as everyone collected themselves to move on to the next hole. I’m not sure if he was a bit sad that he hadn’t been able to sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ to his tree, or if he was thinking about how he’d just planted a real tree. He didn’t seem upset, just thoughtful.

As Janice planted her rowan, the first in the orchard, she named the tree Rowan Tree Farm, which feels entirely appropriate.

That night, while the boy ate a late dinner of a grilled cheese sandwich, he said, “Mama, what was your favourite part of the day?” I thought about it and said, “After we had planted all the trees and went back inside, and we’d all changed into our dry clothes, and we all had drinks and pie, and looked around and enjoyed being with our dear friends after sharing something special.” He then asked his father the same question. When I asked him what his favourite part of the day was, he said thoughtfully, “I loved meeting the dog named Carter and petting him and not hurting his leg.” (Carter, the resident year-old collie/husky/shepherd mix, has had a bad run of luck with his right foreleg, and it is splinted.) Carter’s a big dog, loves people, and is currently sporting the latest in Elizabethan collars so he doesn’t gnaw at the leg, but none of this bothered Liam; he was completely in love with the dog and very careful not to knock the splint. As I was useless with the digging part of the day (thanks, fibro) I spent some time with Carter on a leash along the edge of the field so t! could get some work done, and the dog is definitely personable. I quite enjoyed his company.

Also at dinner, Liam said, “I like Amanda.” (Amanda, whom I have known since I was about eleven, had been a passenger in our car there and back.) And then, completely out of the blue, he said something I’d never heard him say before: “When I’m bigger, I’m going to marry her.” We suspect that her admiration of Blackie and her willingness to get down on the floor and play trucks with him led him to this momentous decision.

Sunday morning I was in a lot of pain, as I’d expected; one doesn’t walk around in an uneven field holding a drenched preschooler and expect to escape unscathed. By the time my in-laws arrived for the Mother’s Day brunch we hosted I was at least functional, though. Savoury quiche, waffles, sausages, piles of fruit, salad, and mimosas. Mmm. The boy began crashing just before noon, so both he and I had a lie-down. He slept for two and a half hours (not surprising given the expected lack of nap the day before) but a rude interruption by an arrogant Hydro rep at our door ruined my chance for rest. I then went off to our monthly group cello lesson after picking a dozen of the tulips from along the side of the house for my cello teacher. Great lesson prepping for the recital in two weeks, but alas, it seems as if we will be cutting my beloved “Ave Verum Corpus,” a hesitant announcement that made all three of us doing the top melody very sad. It’s being bumped to the Christmas recital, and I fully understand why; it needs more work so that all four voices move confidently at the same time, and as the lower voices don’t feel the melody the way we do they’re not as sure about where to move, or even how they’re supposed to sound like against the other parts. But I am sad indeed.

And then last night I finished reading Dan Simmons’ very excellent Drood.

That was my weekend. The end.